The Madwomen of Paris

When I learned of The Madwomen of Paris by Jennifer Cody Epstein, I was excited to dive into the subject of Paris’s Salpêtrière asylum. It would be my second time reading about it in fiction, and I find the whole subject fascinating. This novel just came out last week (sorry for my late review; it got pushed up from its original publication date, hence my tardiness!) and is absolutely one to pick up!

Special thanks to NetGalley and Random House Publishing Group – Ballantine for providing me with an ARC of this book!

Summary

After losing everything, Laure was committed to Paris’s Salpêtrière asylum, where she spent a year as a patient before being cured. Now she works there as a ward attendant, but she’s desperate to leave the asylum and find her missing sister, Amélie. If only she had the funds to do so. While still working there, a new woman is admitted to the asylum: Josephine. Though she has amnesia at first, Josephine soon starts to regain her memory… and believes she may have murdered a man. As the famed doctor Jean-Martin Charcot studies Josephine and features her in his public Friday lectures, Laure works to uncover the truth about Josephine and plots their escape. 

Review

The Madwomen of Paris is the second novel I’ve read about the Salpêtrière asylum and Jean-Martin Charcot. Two years ago, I’d enjoyed The Mad Women’s Ball by Victoria Mas, and I was eager to read more about this time and subject. Despite their similar settings and themes, I love that Jennifer Cody Epstein took her book in a different direction, uncovering other nuances and layers. 

Like the previous novel I’d read, The Madwomen of Paris show the darker side of how the women patients were treated at Salpêtrière, though with less gruesome horror here. We only get glimpses of the worst of it (hydrotherapy; forced feeding tubes), but enough to understand how traumatic it could be for patients. This novel, too, puts focus on Jean-Martin Charcot’s work on researching hysteria in the patients here, including with women shown on stage during his public Friday demonstrations. Here, the focus is largely on his use of hypnotism and the strange studies he does while a patient is hypnotized. It’s fascinating and bizarre in equal measure. 

Another difficult theme throughout The Madwomen of Paris is how women—especially of the time, in 1880s Paris—had little agency over their own lives. Several women here are victims of sexual abuse, unwanted advances, and rape. Men have a habit of “owning” women, whether as a reluctant paramour or as a resistant patient. What Laure and Josephine want is freedom. For both, poverty is yet another obstacle in their way to freedom. Indeed, economic entrapment is as much an issue as entrapment by men. 

Both Laure and Josephine are wonderfully drawn characters. Laure is used to keeping her head down, but she realizes she must make bold choices to change her fate. Josephine, despite her background, has an impulsivity to her, even as her world is crumbling and she continues to keep secrets. Is Josephine truly descending into madness? Is she truly a murderer? 

My favorite chapter in the whole book is number nine—so much happens! The story moves forward, slowly in some chapters and rapidly in others, but always with a hint of uncertainty. It’s a bit gothic, a bit coming of age, with themes of sisterhood, queerness, and women empowerment. I also appreciate the depictions of trauma, loss, and reactions to both. So much of the so-called hysteria of the time would have much different diagnoses today. 

Final Thoughts

The Madwomen of Paris is a hypnotic and haunting book about women agency, mental illness, scientific studies into neurology, and the predatory natures of men and an unjust economic system. This is a book to be absorbed into, and I enjoyed my time with these characters and in this fabled setting in Paris. 

Get the Book

You can buy The Madwomen of Paris here – it’s available as a hardcover, ebook, and audiobook.

The Madwomen of Paris by Jennifer Cody Epstein
Audience	Adult
Genre	Historical Fiction; Gothic Fiction
Setting	Paris, France
Number of Pages	336
Format I Read	ebook (NetGalley)
Original Publication Date	July 11, 2023

Official Summary

Two women fall under the influence of a powerful doctor in Paris’s notorious women’s asylum in this gripping historical novel inspired by true events, from the bestselling author of Wunderland.

“Beautifully crafted . . . Combining elegant prose, artfully chosen historical details, and convincing characterizations, this haunting narrative showcases Epstein at her best.”—Publishers Weekly (starred review)

When Josephine arrives at the Salpêtrière asylum, she is covered in blood, badly bruised, and suffering from amnesia. She is quickly diagnosed with what the Paris papers are calling “the epidemic of the age”: hysteria, a disease is so baffling and widespread that Doctor Jean-Martin Charcot, the asylum’s famous director, devotes many of his popular public lectures to the malady. Charcot often uses hypnosis to prompt his patients to reproduce their hysterical symptoms, and to his delight, Josephine proves extraordinarily susceptible to this unconscious manipulation. He is soon featuring the young woman on his stage, entrancing her into fantastical acts and hallucinatory fits before enraptured audiences and eager newsmen—many of whom feature her on their papers’ front pages.

Laure, a ward attendant assigned to care for Charcot’s new favorite, knows that Josephine’s diagnosis is a godsend. Life in the Salpêtrière’s Hysteria ward is far easier than in its dreaded Lunacy division, from which few inmates ever return. But as Josephine’s fame grows, her memory starts to return—and with it, images of a terrible crime she’s convinced she’s committed. Haunted by these visions, and ensnared in Charcot’s hypnotic web, she starts spiraling into seeming insanity. Desperate to save the girl she has grown to love, Laure begins to plot their escape from the Salpêtrière and its doctors. First, though, she must confirm whether Josephine is truly a madwoman, doomed to die in the asylum—or a murderer, destined for the guillotine.

Both are dark possibilities—but not nearly as dark as what Laure unearths when she sets out to discover the truth.