Women of Magdalene

Young Dr. Robert Mallory, fresh from three blood-soaked years as a field surgeon on the battlefields of the Civil War, makes his way on foot to the Magdalene Ladies’ Lunatic Asylum to assume his duties as the resident general practitioner. When he recovers the body of a young patient in a nearby river, the callous indifference of the authorities disturbs him. He soon finds that mistreatment of the patients is commonplace and that the doctors who run the asylum have little interest in treating the patients—many of whom have no mental disability but have been abandoned there by their families. Before Dr. Mallory can expose the abuse of patients at the facility, and the misogyny and racism at its core, another patient is found dead. Kingston hastily blames a young “Negress” employed by the asylum and shoots her lover and her on the spot. After she is locked up and charged with the murder of a white woman, she is taken from her cell and lynched. Mallory is determined to expose Kingston and exonerate the girl, but Kingston has other plans. Lushly evocative, written with elegance and beauty, this novel is a richly satisfying story of that long-vanished world of slavery and southern gentility.