A Blighted Life

Dismissed as the "mad" wife of the novelist and politician, Lord Edward Bulwer-Lytton, Rosina Bulwer-Lytton was committed to an asylum for the mentally defective by her husband for, among other reasons, openly opposing him during his campaign for election as a Tory MP. Her written retaliation transgresses the boundaries between the public and the private and, in so doing, turns biography into an act of revenge. Whether she continues to be vilified as an hysteric who misrepresented an eminent man or, if the time has come for her to be vindicated as a woman wronged, is for the reader of this new edition to decide.