"For ten days I had been one of them."
On Cita's new free edition of Ten Days in a Mad-House by Nellie Bly: behind the book, our contributors, & further exploration.
Cita newest title is out now! Ten Days in a Mad-House by Nellie Bly is now available to read for free on citapress.org—downloadable formats coming soon! This new edition features a foreword by author and psychoanalyst Mikita Brottman and a cover by Dajia Zhou, who also reinterpreted several of the original illustrations from the 1887 first edition. Read on for more information about the book, its contributors, and further avenues for exploration.
“I was left to begin my career as Nellie Brown, the insane girl. As I walked down the avenue I tried to assume the look which maidens wear in pictures entitled ‘Dreaming.’”
About the Book
In 1887, twenty-three-year-old journalist Nellie Bly disguised herself as "a crazy person" in order to get herself admitted to the Women's Lunatic Asylum on Blackwell's Island (now Roosevelt's Island). The wildly popular series of articles she wrote upon her release were then published as a book: Ten Days in a Mad-House. The exposé was the start of a career in which Nellie herself was usually part of the story.
Modern approaches to Ten Days (including a recent Lifetime movie) tend to sensationalize its darker elements or frame it as a tale of a plucky young heroine who set out to make change. Indeed the book contains images of cruelty that seem to belong in a gothic novel, and Bly’s work did lead to major reforms in New York State asylums. However, there is a lot more than dark scenes and girl-boss-triumphs that one can pull from reading the actual text in 2024. Bly trains her sharp eye (and, often, sharp humor) on the systems through which abuse and neglect proliferates, and exposes how the perception of “insanity” is influenced by gender, poverty, language barriers, and other social factors. The asylum has heroes, villains, and victims. But Bly ultimately paints a larger picture that captures how disparities outside the asylum bars shape the horror within.
Though much has changed in approaches to mental health treatment since Bly was on the Island, there are echoes of what she experienced in later first-person accounts by women who were psychiatric patients (see “Further Exploration” for a reading list). And the questions the book raises— about women’s autonomy, about institutions that give a few people power over many vulnerable people, about how biases influence medical and legal practices, about how we can help each other —remain ever relevant.
It is our hope that this edition will invite more people to engage Bly’s first major work on its own terms. As Mikita Brottman put it in the foreword:
“Bly's account was written for a newspaper, to be read by the wider public rather than an audience versed in journalism or psychology. It is fitting, then, that this new edition is online and free for anyone to read, and taken out of the minimizing context of a ‘celebrity stunt’… Situating the story in this new context allows a contemporary audience to finally understand and appreciate the radical and revelatory nature of Bly's experiment, and of the story she tells.”
Ten Days Contributors
Mikita Brottman is an author, psychoanalyst, and professor of literature at the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore. Her work digs into the psychological and social factors that shape our understandings of each other, offering deeply considered reinterpretations of genres like true crime and topics like mental health. Readers of Ten Days in a Mad-House should check out:
“Crisis Care” for Full-Bleed: An essay reflecting on the author’s own experiences as a patient.
Forensic Transmissions: A curated collection of public domain audio related to crime and violence, unedited and presented without commentary.
Thirteen Girls: A series of fictionalized stories that examines serial killings through the perspectives of people impacted, without naming or focusing on the perpetrators.
Dajia Zhou is an illustrator, storyteller, and daydreamer currently based in Boston, MA. Her approach is playful, but with an edge of darkness that hints at the complexity and humanity underlying each scene. Explore:
“People Watching”: This series inspired Cita in rethinking the original illustrations accompanying Bly’s articles.
One-page comics: Anxiety, communication, (dis)orientation!
“Boba Tea:” For a sweet refreshment after reading a dark story.
Cita Canon Spotlight
In 1885, the Pittsburg Dispatch received a passionate response to a column the paper had recently run: “What Girls Are Good For.” The letter was signed “Lonely Orphan Girl,” and the editor was so impressed he ran ad in the paper to find the author. Elizabeth Cochrane (born Cochran, 1864-1922) then began writing for the paper under the pseudonym Nellie Bly. She left the Dispatch after getting stuck writing fluff pieces for the “women’s pages” and made her way to Mexico, where she got in trouble for criticizing restrictions to the press. She landed in New York and convinced the New York World to hire her by agreeing to go undercover on Blackwell’s Island. She went on to investigate conditions in factories, prisons, and workhouses, exposing the struggles of working and marginalized women. She also interviewed controversial figures like anarchist Emma Goldman and covered the suffrage movement.
Bly’s popularity encouraged newspapers to hire other women as investigative reporters, creating the era of “stunt girl” journalism. In 1889, she took on her most famous project when she took on the fictional record from Jules Verne’s Around the World in Eighty Days. She circumnavigated the globe in seventy-two days, trailed by much publicity and a competitor, Elizabeth Bisland. She later left journalism to run her ailing husband’s manufacturing company. Towards the end of her life, she reported from the Eastern Front of World War I.
Bly was a celebrity, but her fame was built on her writing. As Jean Marie Lutes put it in her introduction to the collection Around the World in Seventy-Two Days and Other Writings:
“Bly tends to be remembered as a headline, not an author. But the skills at self-promotion that made her career possible would have been useless if they had not been combined with an imaginative mind, a wry sensibility, an eye for telling details, a light touch with dialogue, and a finely honed sense of how to cast herself as a character in her own news stories…She wasn’t just the first; she was the best.”
[Arlisha R. Norwood on Nellie Bly for the National Women’s History Museum]
Further Exploration
These online resources were particularly informative/inspiring when we were putting together the book. For more, check out our Are.na channel for the book, and the edition’s bibliography. We’ll also be digging into some of these projects in more detail in future newsletters.
Hearing Voices: Memoirs from the Margins of Mental Health is an online version of a 2022 exhibit at The Library Company of Philadelphia, curated by Rachel D'Agostino and Sophia Dahab. It highlights first-person accounts, artworks, and other materials by people who were patients in 19th-century American asylums.
Madwomen in the Attic is a mental health and madness literacy and advocacy organization rooted in feminist and disability theory. It connects women and gender non-conforming people with support and literacy resources, including writing projects and workshops.
Nellie Bly: A Resource Guide compiles various documents, images, and other resources related to Nellie Bly in the Library of Congress’ digital collections.
“The best books set in psychiatric hospitals by women who have spent time there” is a reading list by foreword author Mikita Brottman.
“On the Ward” from Esmé Weijun Wang’s essay collection The Collected Schizophrenias connects the author’s experiences in psych wards with Ten Days in a Mad-House. (Read an excerpt via Buzzfeed.)
“I had looked forward so eagerly to leaving the horrible place, yet when my release came and I knew that God’s sunlight was to be free for me again, there was a certain pain in leaving. For ten days I had been one of them.”