This event is free and open to the public.
Join author Catherine Lowell '11 for a book talk about bravery, sacrifice, feminism, and how themes explored by the Brontës are still relevant and applicable to us today. The author will be available to sign copies of her recently published debut novel, The Madwoman Upstairs.
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About The Madwoman Upstairs
In Catherine Lowell's suspenseful and smart debut novel, The Madwoman Upstairs, the last remaining descendant of the Brontës embarks on a modern-day literary treasure hunt to find the family’s secret estate, guided only by the sparse clues her father left behind and the Brontës novels themselves.
Samantha Whipple is accustomed to the media frenzy that follows her wherever she goes. Since her father’s untimely death, she is the presumed heir to a long-rumored trove of diaries, paintings, letters, and early novel drafts passed down from Charlotte, Emily, and Anne—a hidden fortune never revealed to anyone outside of the family, but endlessly speculated about by Brontë scholars and fanatics. Samantha, however, has never seen this alleged estate and, for all she knows, it’s just as fictional as Jane Eyre or Wuthering Heights.
Yet everything changes when Samantha enrolls at Oxford University and long lost objects from the past begin rematerializing in her life. Her father’s distinctive copy of Jane Eyre, which should have perished in the fire that claimed his life, mysteriously appears on Samantha’s dormitory bed pillow. Annotated in her father’s handwriting, the book is the first of many clues in an elaborate scavenger hunt derived from the world’s greatest literature. With the help of a handsome but inscrutable (very Mr. Rochester-esque) professor, Samantha must plunge into a vast literary mystery and an untold family legacy, one that can only be solved by decoding the clues hidden within the Brontës’ own writing.
The Madwoman Upstairs is an inventive, exhilarating debut by an exciting new talent who offers a moving exploration of what it means when the greatest truth is, in fact, fiction.
Learn more and order the book here.
