City of Incurable Women

By: Maud Casey

Narrated by: Hope Newhouse

Length: 2 hrs and 58 mins

Publisher's summary

In a fusion of fact and fiction, 19th-century women institutionalized as hysterics reveal what history ignored.

“City of Incurable Women is a brilliant exploration of the type of female bodily and psychic pain once commonly diagnosed as hysteria - and the curiously hysterical response to it commonly exhibited by medical men. It is a novel of powerful originality, riveting historical interest, and haunting lyrical beauty.” (Sigrid Nunez, author of The Friend and What Are You Going Through)

“Where are the hysterics, those magnificent women of former times?” wrote Jacques Lacan. Long history’s ghosts, marginalized and dispossessed due to their gender and class, they are reimagined by Maud Casey as complex, flesh-and-blood people with stories to tell. These linked, evocative prose portraits, accompanied by period photographs and medical documents both authentic and invented, poignantly restore the humanity to the 19th-century female psychiatric patients confined in Paris’ Salpêtrière hospital and reduced to specimens for study by the celebrated neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot and his male colleagues.

Maud Casey is the author of five books of fiction, including The Man Who Walked Away, and a work of nonfiction, The Art of Mystery: The Search for Questions. A Guggenheim Fellow and recipient of the St. Francis College Literary Prize, she teaches at the University of Maryland.

©2022 Maud Casey (P)2022 Vibrance Press

Critic reviews

“An innovative novel.... Soaringly lyrical” (Kirkus Reviews)

“In exquisite prose, Maud Casey has built a city inside a book, a city that is a hospital, a museum, a dance, a body in ecstasy just outside the frame. On every page of this achingly beautiful book, Casey brings a wise and feral attention to the so-called incurables of the ‘era of soul science’ - Augustine, Louise, Marie, Geneviève, and a chorus of nameless others singing their private beginnings and public ends.” (Danielle Dutton, author of Sprawl and Margaret the First)

“I would follow Maud Casey anywhere. In City of Incurable Women, she has given us her best work yet. This is a song for the forgotten, full of voices that will stay with you and guide you - an astonishing portrayal of rage and hope. What a glorious work of art and what a true gift to us.” (Paul Yoon, author of Snow Hunters and Run Me to Earth)

Beautiful Prose

Casey’s prose is luminous and perfectly paired with Newhouse’s narrative style.

This is not a novel, at least not in the standard sense. There is no plot, no character arc, no character development. It’s best described as a collection of vignettes or character studies. If Casey took a few of these studies and developed a fictional novel from them, it would certainly be interesting. As beautifully written as it is, the book goes nowhere. That’s not to say I didn’t enjoy it, it just wasn’t what I had expected.