The Painted Bridge - Wendy Wallace

The Painted Bridge was one of those books that spoke to me as soon as I saw it on the shelf - a gorgeous evocative cover, a setting in Victorian England (one of my favourite reading/historical periods) and a topic area covering women's mental health and the treatment of women in asylums.
The book starts by introducing the reader to Lake House - "a private asylum for genteel women of a delicate nature" as the back cover blurb tells us. A resident of the asylum is having her photograph taken as a method of diagnosing and treating her particular  "illness" by a young and experimental doctor, Lucas St Clair. The reader is taken from this scene to one where the main character, Anna Palmer is first bought to the asylum - without her knowledge or consent - by her husband.
The book follows Anna's journey through the various treatment models used by the asylum and it's staff and her determination to prove her sanity and be released. Along the way many other characters are introduced, some in quite a lot of detail, and I felt this was one of the down falls of the book. There were so many different characters and back stories to take into consideration it was hard to know where your focus as a reader should lie.
Anna interacts with the other residents of the asylum and comes to know their stories for being there and she also begins a tentative friendship with the young daughter of the owner of the asylum which leads to one of the main adventure scenes of the book. We are also taken into Anna's childhood (much as a psychiatrist or therapist might take a client) and learn of the important events of her life including the death of her father and her marriage to a man who is not what he first seems.
The book is definitely a page turner - there is plenty to keep a reader interested and occupied but, as I have said above, Anna's story probably could have been a lot tighter without the distractions of so many others competing for the reader's attention.

True Pleasures - A Memoir of Women in Paris - Lucinda Holdforth

I started reading True Pleasures - A Memoir of Women in Paris before we left for our trip in September and have only just finished it now so my reading has been a little disjointed - but fortunately I think this is the sort of book that lends itself to the "dipping" style of reading.

The Australian author of the book has reached a crossroads in her life - feeling unsatisfied with her career and feeling like there must be "something more" she heads to Paris to spend 3 weeks researching and reflecting on the lives of influential women who have connected with and impacted on that city in some way:

Through this strange period of reading and working and contemplating their past and my future, the women of Paris - wild, noble, brave, bad, strong, foolish - came to represent important things to me: the grand scale that an individual can achieve; the beautiful arc that a finished life can describe; the radiant, limitless scope of female potentiality.

And I found that the individual stories of these women's lives did not exist in isolation, but connected across time and space, like threads in the grand narrative tapestry that is the story of Paris itself.

Holdforth divides the book into chapters with each focusing on a particular woman relevant to the story of Paris - and women whose stories are interconnected with that of Paris. Women such as Colette, Nancy Mitford, Edith Wharton, Coco Chanel, George Sand and Madame de Pompadour are all explored in greater or lesser detail as well as many others.

I must admit I was drawn to this book mainly because I was about to go to Paris for the first time and I was hungry to consume as much reading material as I could about this city before I arrived there - but I an actually glad that I finished this book after coming back from my trip - it somehow meant more to me being able to have images in my mind of some of the places the author describes.

I really enjoyed the way the author talks about her own history with Paris - as well as her history in Australia - for me this provided a great context for her story and why she was on this crusade to discover more about the women of Paris's history and what drove them. However, I am able to see that some of her narrative may be confusing and boring for non-Australian readers. As an Aussie girl I didn't have that problem though and I enjoyed reading Holdforth's comparisons of the two cultures:

In Australia we do girls very well: young, fresh, ignorant, sexy girls. Not that I was one of them. I was pale and bookish and wore black tights in winter and secondhand sixties' frocks in summer. In France they like women, grown-up women. Ellen once said to me that the French don't consider a women starts to become interesting until she is thirty-five years old.

And with my 35th Birthday approaching I am starting to realise why I connected with Paris so well...

I found the stories of the individual women interesting and the little snippets that Holdforth has put into her book have only made me want to go out and read more about each of them. I found the book a great combination of history and fact and personal reflection and thought:

If Paris is a feast, then I'm still hungry. I haven't yet had my fill: in fact, I doubt I will ever be sated. That's why I'll just have to keep coming back.

I couldn't agree more.