Book Review - 'The Girl Puzzle' by Kate Braithwaite

This is another book that’s on my Kindle, which I read a couple of years ago and decided to re-read as I remember enjoying it. Let’s see if I enjoyed it as much second time around…

‘Down to her last dime and offered the chance of a job of a lifetime at The New York World, twenty-three-year old Elizabeth Cochrane agrees to get herself admitted to Blackwell’s Island Lunatic Asylum and report on conditions from the inside. But what happened to her poor friend, Tilly Mayard? Was there more to her high praise of Dr Frank Ingram than everyone knew?
Thirty years later, Elizabeth, known as Nellie Bly, is no longer a celebrated trailblazer and the toast of Newspaper Row. Instead, she lives in a suite in the Hotel McAlpin, writes a column for The New York Journal and runs an informal adoption agency for the city’s orphans.
Beatrice Alexander is her secretary, fascinated by Miss Bly and her causes and crusades. Asked to type up a manuscript revisiting her employer’s experiences in the asylum in 1887, Beatrice believes she’s been given the key to understanding one of the most innovative and daring figures of the age.’

This is the first book I’ve read by this author, her third historical novel.

I’d heard of Nellie Bly before, whose real name was Elizabeth Cochrane, but didn’t know much about her and had never looked any further.

The story is told from two points of view – one first, the other third – in two separate timelines.

It opens in 1919 – the novel’s ‘present’ – with Beatrice, the first-person point of view character. She’s typist and secretary to Nellie Bly, whose real name is Elizabeth Cochrane, at Bly’s home, which consists of a suite of rooms in the McAlpin Hotel in New York where she keeps herself busy with “her columns and crusades” including, and especially, doing whatever she can to help deprived children and orphans.

Beatrice tells us she “kept [Miss Bly’s] diary on track, reminded her of promises made, and ensured she replied to as many letters as humanly possible. I even walked her dog…”

As she doesn’t have a husband to go home to, unlike her two colleagues, Beatrice tends to stay later and chat with Bly. She tells her employer she’d love to know her full story.

Whether in response to this or not, Bly gives her a folder to type up, telling her not to show it to her colleagues.

The next chapter takes us to the past, to September 1887 where we meet Elizabeth, a young woman in her early 20s, determined to make a living in New York. And her part of the story is told in third person.

Having done journalistic work for her local newspaper, ‘The Pittsburgh Dispatch’, which included writing of her travels to Mexico, she’s determined to work for a New York newspaper even though the consensus of opinion is that women are not suited for the job.

Having already met with six editors, each as infuriating as the other, Elizabeth decides her best bet is Colonel John Cockerill at ‘The World’. She makes her way to “City Hall, an area that was busy whatever the hour… The newspapers on Park Row produced several issues throughout the day and employed hundreds of people… and attracted thousands more… Newspaper Row was at work every hour of the day, and the area boasted saloons and restaurants ready to supply the hard-working employees of an industry on the rise.”

She marches into the offices of ‘The World’ and “skipped up two flights of stairs past the composing rooms. The rattle of the basement presses reverberated through the floor, a familiar beat on the soles of her boots. The City Room took up the entire third floor. A maze of desks squatted under a thin cloud of cigar smoke.”

With a sprinkling of luck and employing a huge amount of confidence, Elizabeth manages to secure a meeting with Cockerill where she gives it her all to convince him to hire her.

When he says, “There are places where a woman simply cannot go”, she counters with, “Perhaps. But then aren’t there equally places where only a woman can go?”

Eventually, he agrees to talk with the owner of the newspaper, Joseph Pulitzer.

When Elizabeth returns to meet with both men, she’s brimming with ideas, but they put forward an idea of their own, which involves Blackwell’s Island, where there have been several reports of scandals.

“Blackwell’s Island, a long sliver of land in the East River, was home to a range of public buildings that no man or woman ever had any ambition to inhabit: the smallpox hospital; the penitentiary; the poorhouse; and the insane asylum.”

They want the inside story from the lunatic asylum. If Elizabeth is successful, there’ll be a permanent position for her at ‘The World’.

Elizabeth agrees and wastes no time in working out how to get herself admitted.

The story then alternates between Elizabeth and Beatrice.

Through Beatrice’s eyes, we learn more of the enigmatic Bly, now in her mid-50s, and what drives her as the young secretary types up Bly’s story of her time in the asylum. What had been printed in the newspapers had been the straightforward facts of conditions in the asylum and how the inmates were treated.

But the notes Bly has given Beatrice gives us the full story of how she herself had been affected by her time in the asylum, and of her relationship with her mother and siblings. It shows us the flawed individual who, despite her achievements, is still filled with an incessant need to do all in her power to ‘make things right’.

The other part of the story that takes place in the present concerns a young orphan girl and Bly’s efforts in getting her placed with a family, which brings her in conflict with the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children; they don’t agree with her methods. As Beatrice tells us, “Miss Bly’s sense of right and wrong was very strong. It just didn’t always accord with everyone else’s.”

In her notes, Elizabeth describes how, feigning low-key madness, she succeeds in getting herself declared insane and sent to Blackwell’s.

Although eager to do her job, she faces moments of realising how powerless she now is. When she’s checked by the asylum’s doctor and one of the nurses, she “marvelled at this whole new experience. It was almost like being invisible. As an insane woman she was no longer even seen by this pair of dalliers.”

Conditions in the asylum are worse than Elizabeth imagined. The women are all dressed in thin calico, even the sick ones. Their rooms are cold with no heat and the food is terrible – rancid butter, sour tea, tough meat, cold and tasteless. They sit for hours on end in one room with nothing to do, watched closely by nurses who don’t treat them well.

Elizabeth quietly talks to some of the women, to get their stories. And one wonders how many of these women are genuinely insane.

One, with a German accent, tells Elizabeth her “parents died on our way here.” She wasn’t allowed to see her parents; when she left the boat, her parents didn’t. “’I waited and waited and cried and wailed, but they did not let me back on board to look at the bodies. There were too many, they said… They threw them into the sea.’ Elizabeth tried to picture this woman landing in America and searching for her parents… She must have been causing a scene. Being inconvenient. A problem. Grieving. Did that make her mad?”

By her third day in the asylum, Elizabeth has had enough. “She didn’t want to wash her face or stand in line for another poor meal… she didn’t want to sit and interrogate other patients. She’d seen enough of the place and its unkind doctors and mean-spirited nurses.” How quickly one’s joie de vivre and enthusiasm are sucked away in the face of unrelenting awfulness.

But, having been officially committed, she can’t simply up and leave. She’s at the mercy of Cockerill and Pulitzer and whenever they decide to get her out.

When Elizabeth does get to write her story, it set in motion official steps to improve conditions at the asylum.

Elizabeth – Nellie Bly – comes across as an interesting young woman, considering the times she lived in. She’s someone who doesn’t let the accepted norm stand in her way; she knows what she wants, and she does her best to get it. Although she may tread on a few toes getting there, she’s a kind-hearted woman with a strong sense of right and wrong. When she sees injustice or unfairness, she’s compelled to do something about it.

Kate Braithwaite has done a good job bringing this extraordinary woman to life. She doesn’t portray her as a saint, but a real woman, warts and all.

Beatrice is well-written too. She obviously adores Bly but isn’t so blind that she doesn’t see the woman’s faults.

I like Braithwaite’s writing – straightforward, not in the least bit frilly, which I think suits her subject matter well. Some might find her style a bit too matter of fact, but I think it underlines the horrid misery of life in an asylum in the late 1800s.

I’ve always wondered how many women from the times before rigorous testing was put in place truly belonged in asylums since they were established in the 18th century. I mention women specifically as they were the ones most likely to be committed by fathers and husbands if deemed ‘inconvenient’.

It was beyond sad to read that, although there were genuine madwomen at Blackwell’s, “there were also far too many women trapped in the place for the wrong reasons… sent there by their own families because of squabbles over property or money… women who were unwell and branded hysterical… women who were simply foreign, poor and unable to fight the system. They were inconvenient, these women, not insane.
“So many… seemed cast in shadows and confusion, their hope and confidence lost. Tedium and lethargy, and no outlet or occupation to lift the spirits, opened the door to malicious thoughts and violence… Those who were not ill, would likely become ill. The sane would become mad.”

There is an unexpectedly delightful touch, from a writer’s point of view, when Elizabeth converses with a woman who loves stories. When she asks Elizabeth to tell her story, the woman says things like, “A good story has a beginning, a middle, and end. You sound like you’re making a list, not telling a story… Better. Now add some detail… I sense a turning point. All this happiness. It’s not good story material. What happened next?”

At the end of the story, Braithwaite has included an extensive ‘Historical Afterword’, detailing Bly’s life. She also points out what is fact and what is fiction in the story, which I appreciated as I learned there were more characters who actually existed than I realised while reading the story.

I’m glad to report that I enjoyed the story for the second time, and it’s one I’m sure I’ll read again. I’m also going to check out Braithwaite’s two other novels.