Murder At The Lunatic’s Ball by R S Leonard
A Victorian asylum. A woman imprisoned. A deadly secret.
England, 1875. London journalist, Harris Mortimer, visits a Hampshire lunatic asylum to investigate society’s treatment of the insane, only to find himself in a fateful encounter with a beautiful woman claiming to be wrongly incarcerated.
Horrified by a series of murders, he soon becomes drawn into the strange world of the asylum and begins to wonder who is truly mad and who is sane.
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Back in London, Harris meets Nancy Carter, a young woman striving to become a music hall star. Nancy’s shocking act, based on madness and murder, has uncanny parallels with Harris’s recent experiences in Hampshire.
Is it all just a coincidence? To what lengths will one person go to exact their revenge?
As the fates of Harris and Nancy intertwine, they are about to discover the terrible consequences of uncovering the truth.
Music, madness and murder collide in this thrilling historical mystery for fans of Stacey Halls, Jessie Burton and Elizabeth Macneal. A perfect book club fiction selection, Murder at the Lunatics’ Ball discusses themes of social control, the female lunatic stereotype, and the struggle by women to earn their bread and find their voice in Victorian England.
My Review
I didn’t expect to love this as much as I did, but it was just brilliant. I loved every minute. It’s shocking to discover the things they did in the asylums in the late 1800s (and continued to do so for many years to come).
Women, of course had the worst of it. Any ‘issues’ and they were immediately considered neurotic, suffering from Ophelia syndrome (based on Hamlet’s Ophelia declining into madness when jilted) or from erotomania. The latter could, at the extreme, involve a ‘cure’ called a clitoridectomy that was similar to female genital mutilation – GFM – as we know it today. Oh yes, we did these things as well. Thank goodness it was rarely carried out.
My mother had a lobotomy in the early 1950s (I apologise as I’ve mentioned this before), another horrific practice: “The goal was to reduce the intensity of emotions, calm erratic behavior, and make patients more manageable…..but could lead to personality changes, intellectual deterioration, and even death due to complications.” The practice was discontinued thankfully.
In Murder At The Lunatic’s Ball, young, beautiful, talented Titania Rosetti has been admitted to the asylum. She has chosen this path for reasons that are unknown throughout the majority of the book. When she wants to leave, she says she is being prevented, and throws herself on the mercy of London journalist, Harris Mortimer, who is visiting the asylum to write an article for The Times newspaper. Some of his views regarding women are pretty suspect to say the least. Women have to be clean and pure, yet he spends half his time ministering to a man’s needs, involving prostitutes and bawdy houses.
The action then moves to London, where Nancy Carter, who bears an uncanny resemblance to Titania, is trying desperately to become a music hall star, her shocking act based on the madness and murder at the asylum.
I am fascinated by Victorian Britain, its Gothic mysteries, and the treatment of its women, and read a lot of books in those genres, but Murder At The Lunatic’s Ball is quite unique. I loved it.
PS Made me laugh that Titania Rosetti and her friend Miss Millais are obviously made-up names but journalist Harris Mortimer doesn’t twig.
Many thanks to @annecater for inviting me to be part of #RandomThingsTours
About the Author
R S Leonard was born in Cheshire, England, and after a long stint in London, then Hampshire, now lives back in her home county.
She’s always had a deep love of storytelling and history, inspired, no doubt, by her mum encouraging her to get the utmost out of the public library as a kid. She has a PhD in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture and MAs in Creative Writing and Victorian Studies. These inspired her recently-published second historical mystery novel, Murder at the Lunatics’ Ball, as well as her first, The Body, the Diamond and the Child.
By day, she works in the non-profit sector.
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