Mad Barbara

Barbara Purcell finds her father dead in the music-room, and nothing after that will ever be quiet again. Set in the 1690s during Restoration England, Warwick Deeping's novel follows a woman who refuses to mourn properly. While society demands she weep modestly, marry well, and let sleeping killers lie, Barbara instead obsesses over the truth of her father's murder. Her mother Anne watches with alarm as grief curdles into something harder to name. When Lord Gore and his son John enter Barbara's orbit, the novel shifts from mourning to menace: here might be allies, or here might be the very rot she's hunting. Deeping captures something unsettling about a woman who will not perform her grief correctly in an era that needed women silent. The "madness" in the title might be simply this: a woman who refused to be palatable in her grief, who wanted justice more than she wanted comfort. It remains compelling for the same reason it likely scandalized 1908 readers: it takes a woman's anger deadly seriously.