93 books like A Madness So Discreet

The Yellow Wallpaper inspired my book and brand. Gilman not only defined the madwoman of Gothic literature by writing one of the most haunting and empowering stories of the 19th century, but she also lived it. Her experience inspired her story and exposed the horror of hysteria treatments. This story inspired me because I could relate to Gilman and her main character. Though hysteria is no longer a recognized condition and women have gained many more rights, ideologies left over from the hysteria panic still creep in our culture and generational memory. Women are still called crazy. The assumption that women are emotionally unstable is still used to discredit, invalidate and control women. In an era where women couldn’t fight for their rights as we do, Gilman found her power by embracing madness, and so do I.

A startling kaleidoscope of a novel – indicated by the arresting cover.

Mas’ book whirled me into the heart of its narrative with fast-moving stories of women whose lives are radically changed by supernatural encounters – which, in 19th century Paris, invite diagnoses of mental illness. What follows is a disorienting but compulsive account of 'madness', ‘other-world-ness’ - and the dangers of being different.

Beautifully imagined and expertly crafted, this novel engrossed me – and I learned a lot about mental asylums, and attitudes to women, in rather unenlightened times. A fabulous book.

For me, this is another masterful interweaving of historical fact and wildly creative imagination. It’s a prime example of in-depth research wielded to tangibly ground the reader in the book’s world; you learn about everything from 19th-century psychological theory and forensics to quilt-making and housecleaning techniques.

Part of what I really love about the novel, though, is that unlike in The Handmaid’s Tale, here Atwood deliberately blurs the lines between “good” and “evil” and “victim” and “villain.” Grace isn’t entirely likable, and she’s pretty much entirely unreliable. So, embodying her perspective as a reader is a continual guessing game of whether or not she’s telling the truth about her role in the murders at the book’s center. At the same time, it’s also a kind of ethical guessing game, for even if Grace is guilty, Atwood makes the role society and class play in her downfall so painfully clear… show more.

I read An Inconvenient Wife years ago and it has always stuck with me.

As I dove into my research for my book, I reread this book and was just as impressed with it as I was the first time.

Lucy is the epitome of the upper-class New York Victorian woman but only if she bends to the will of her husband and physicians. It is a classic tale of yet another 19th-century woman forced into an asylum.

Lucy is subjected not only to medications but treatment for her “hysteria” which was the common diagnosis for most women in the asylum at the time. It was brilliantly researched and written!

A comprehensive examination of the Ohio Valley native nations during the decades leading up to Dunmore’s War. Though the covering of the actual campaign makes up a small portion of this book, any researcher desiring a balanced view of the conflict for land in the Ohio couldn’t ask for a better resource than A Country Between.

Angie’s life is a mess. Her mother constantly taunts her as “Fat Angie.” High school classmates torment her as a “crazy, mad cow,” when she tries to slit her wrists in a high school assembly. Her heroic sister goes MIA during the Iraq War; her older brother treats her badly. Angie just wants to make it through each day until a beautiful new student arrives and befriends her, seeing the hidden beauty in Angie. I was revolted by Angie’s abusive family life and angry at the peer bullying. Where were school authorities? I was relieved when a warm friendship allowed Angie to become happy on her own. Though it seems extreme, I’ve occasionally observed similar situations among my students; the novel is horrifyingly realistic, but it moves in a positive fashion to its end.

Dawn Powell is one of the most overlooked literary figures in America from this time. Her acid wit (and gender) immediately begs comparison to Dorothy Parker. A New Yorker transplanted from Ohio, she wrote many plays and novels from the 30s to the 60s. Wicked Pavilion was published in 1954 and is a delicious satire of a group of artists who frequent a small bistro near Washington Square Park – hard-drinking writers, poets, and painters. It features a hilarious subplot of a painter who stages his own death so the value of his paintings will increase. The antidote to Henry James, Dawn Powell writes like Edith Wharton on laughing gas.

This book is part odyssey, part ghost story, and part passion play. Toni Morrison is one of the patron saints of American literature whom I was fortunate to discover at an early age. This is her masterpiece, an example of what is possible when a writer’s heart, mind, and spirit are aligned.

The fact that the unfathomable sacrifice around which Beloved is imagined is based upon an actual event speaks volumes about the innate horrors of slavery. In matters of race, America’s skeletons are buried in shallow graves.

Based on the boyhood memories of author Sherwood Anderson, Winesburg, Ohio is one of the best portraits of small-town American life in the 19th century.

Centered around the coming-of-age of George Willard, the 22 stories in the book provide numerous character sketches of people in the fictional town of Winesburg. Anderson writes in a plain style that suits the world he describes.

The book pioneers an approach to fictional portraiture also taken up by Wiseman in his later Our-Town cycle of films that focus on individual rural communities—Aspen, Belfast, Maine, In Jackson Heights, and Monrovia, Indiana—and adopt a seemingly similar straightforward style. Like those films, the book features a series of glimpses that together add up more than just the sum of its parts.

Set just prior to the Civil War, this novel is one I’ve often recommended since first reading it years ago. The novel’s four main characters, enslaved mistresses of Southern men, are well-rendered and complex and stayed with me long after I finished the book. I was drawn by the women’s distinct personalities and how they responded to the harsh realities of their lives.

The novel also introduced me to a piece of my home state’s history: Tawawa House was a summer resort in southwestern Ohio popular among southern planters who brought their enslaved mistresses despite Ohio being a free state. (The resort would later become the site of Wilberforce University, the nation’s oldest private, historically black university owned and operated by African Americans.)