THE MATCHBOX GIRL: Recreating Hans Asperger's world in fiction

In this episode novelist and playwright Alice Jolly talks about her latest novel, 'The Matchbox Girl'' about a neurodiverse girl and then young woman who is referred to Asperger's clinic in Vienna in the 1930s. Alice talks about her decision to use a female patient/narrator and how the book 'felt like a radio you couldn't properly tune in' until she found Adelheid, her narrator's voice. We discuss other members of the clinical team including Annie Weiss and George Frankl, both of who had to leave the clinic because they were Jewish and migrated to America. We discuss revelations about Asperger's child referrals to the clinic where the disabled were killed, a practice that wasn't public at the time but seems to have been widely known - an action at odds with the clinic sheltering a Jewish boy througout the war and the way he emphasises the social value of the patients he describes in his paper on 'autistic psychopathy'. We also touch on the appalling and discredited 'refrigerator mother' theory from the 1950s, an idea dismissed by Asperger in his 1944 paper. Great insights into the backgorund to an engaging novel.

Participants:

Alice Jolly, novelist and playwright https://alicejolly.com/wp/

Ken Barrett is an artist, writer and retired neuropsychiatrist http://www.kenbarrettstudio.co.uk/

Alice's novel ‘The Matchbox Girl’: https://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/matchbox-girl-9781526681034

More on Hans Asperger: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hans_Asperger

More on Annie Weiss and Georg Frankl: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/337935440_The_Forgotten_Pioneers_The_Life_and_Work_of_Anni_Weiss_and_Georg_Frankl_updated

Music: Prelude to Act 1 of the opera Brainland composed by Stephen Brown www.brainlandtheopera.co.uk

Sketch by KB.

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