The Shutter of Snow (Virago Modern Classics) - Softcover

Coleman, Emily Holmes

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0140161449 ISBN 13: 9780140161441

Publisher: Penguin Group USA, 1986

Synopsis

After bearing her first child, Marthe Gail has a nervous breakdown and begins to believe that she is Jesus Christ returned to earth as a woman

About this title

Review

Emily Holmes Coleman's The Shutter of Snow presents a close study of what it was like to be treated in a 19th-century mental hospital. The innovative language and viewpoint follow the thoughts and actions of Marthe Gail, institutionalized for depression after the birth of her son. Coleman draws a brilliant picture of Gail's mind and its passage through the fog of her illness; portraits of other patients and the caretakers who attend them are equally striking. Unlike Charlotte Perkins Gilman's The Yellow Wall-Paper, in this startling story Marthe's husband offers loving support while she sorts through her delusions of being God and her violent behavior.

Review

"Coleman's lyrical rendering of her... treatment for post-partum psychosis... fresh and immediate and, at the same time, historically revealing." -- Publishers Weekly

"An extraordinary, visionary book, written out of those edges where madness and poetry meet." -- Fay Weldon

"The book is no less graphic than it is authentic, an extremely rare achievement in the 'firsthand' document school of letters, for usually we have drama at the expense of truth, or bald facts that unwittingly falsify the picture. The Shutter of Snow is a profoundly moving book, supplying as it does a glimpse of what a temporary derangement and its consequences may mean to the sufferer." -- The Nation

Edition details

• Publisher: Penguin Group USA
• Publication date: 1986
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0140161449
• ISBN 13: 9780140161441
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 219