The Shutter of Snow

A shattering, revelatory novel of postpartum psychosis: “An extraordinary, visionary book, written out of those edges where madness and poetry meet.” —Fay Weldon

The only novel by twentieth-century magazine writer Emily Holmes Coleman, The Shutter of Snow delivers a surreal portrayal of one woman’s stay at an insane asylum, and is based on Coleman’s own experience of suffering a nervous breakdown after a postpartum infection.

“Have you never had anyone you cared about kept away from you?” These are the words Marthe Gail flings at a nurse, one of the many cold and indifferent caregivers supervising her stay at the Gorestown State Hospital in New York. Weakened in body and mind by the trauma of birth, Marthe is at the mercy of primitive mental health practices: swaddled and strapped into canvas sheets, and forbidden to see her husband and newborn son. As winter ebbs and flows outside her window, Marthe experiences delusions, seeing skeletons and devils. She finds moments of forbidden freedom in playing the piano and dancing naked in the ward, while longing for simple things—her dressing gown, a brush and comb, her husband’s touch. Her only means of escape is to maintain the calm, “womanly” demeanor demanded by the doctors for eventual release.

A nightmarish, hallucinatory glimpse into one woman’s damaged psyche, The Shutter of Snow is “a very striking triumph of imagination and technique . . . The book is not only quite unique; it is also a work of genuine literary inspiration” (Edwin Muir).

“Stunning.” —Claire-Louise Bennett

“A work which has stirred me deeply . . . compelling.” —Harold Nicholson