Madwoman

June 20, 2022
Treger’s middling latest (after The Dragon Lady) chronicles the early life and career of pioneering female journalist Nellie Bly. Outspoken tomboy Elizabeth Jane “Pink” Cochran is raised in rural Pennsylvania by parents who nurture her gift for storytelling. Her vivid imagination is diagnosed as hysteria by one doctor, and her father’s unexpected death leaves the family impoverished, dashing Pink’s hopes for higher education. After the family moves to Pittsburgh, Pink persuades the Pittsburgh Dispatch to hire her despite her gender and, under the Bly pen name, writes controversial exposés of slum and factory conditions. Relocating to New York City, she can’t find a paper that will hire a woman reporter until she makes an audacious proposal to Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World: she’ll feign madness and get herself committed to the mental hospital on Blackwell’s Island to investigate rumors of inhumane practices there. A deal is struck, and she soon finds the conditions are even more brutal than she imagined, leaving her wondering if she’ll leave the island with both mind and body intact. While Bly’s time at the madhouse is too well-documented (not least by Bly herself) to offer much in the way of surprise, Treger’s evocation of the reporter’s formative years is illuminating. It’s decently done, but the straightforward treatment doesn’t do enough to animate or reevaluate some rather well-known terrain.

July 1, 2022
Elizabeth "Pinky" Cochran's home life shatters when her father dies and her mother unwisely remarries. This cements Pinky's resolution to eschew marriage in favor of journalism. She finagles a job at a Pittsburgh newspaper under the pen name Nellie Bly, but craves the tough reporting to be found in New York. As editor after editor slams the door in her face, she makes a desperate pitch to the New York World, offering to go undercover at Blackwell's Island asylum and report on the conditions of the women patients. It's easy to get herself incarcerated, less easy to get out again. Abuse, filthy conditions, disease, starvation rations, and casual cruelty threaten to shatter even those who are not mad; Nellie's scoop takes a back seat to survival. Romantic tension with an asylum doctor and suspense as to Nellie's release combine with Treger's (The Dragon Lady, 2019) use of the real-life Bly's famous "stunt journalism" to highlight the horrific plight of endangered women--many perfectly sane but inconvenient wives, prostitutes, and immigrants were deemed insane--and the appalling state of nineteenth-century mental health care.

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