Sarah Moss

In Victorian Cornwall, a doctor risks her marriage to fight for female asylum patients: “One of the most memorable heroines of recent fiction ” (The Times, London). Shortlisted for the Wellcome Book Prize for Historical Fiction Ally Moberley, a recently qualified doctor, never expected to marry until she met architect Tom Cavendish. But only weeks into their marriage, Tom sets out for Japan, leaving Ally as she begins work at the Truro Asylum in Cornwall. Horrified by the brutal attitudes of male doctors and nurses toward their female patients, Ally plunges into the institutional politics of women’s mental health at a time when madness is only just being imagined as treatable. She has to contend with a longstanding tradition of permanently institutionalizing women who are deemed difficult, all the while fighting to be taken seriously in a profession dominated by men. Meanwhile, Tom is overseeing the building of lighthouses, and has a commission from a wealthy collector to bring back embroideries and woodwork. As he travels Japan in search of these enchanting objects, he begins to question the value of the life he left in England. As Ally becomes increasingly absorbed in the moral importance of her work, and Tom pursues his interests on the other side of the world, they will return to each other as different people. From the blustery coast of Western England to the landscape of Japan, Signs for Lost Children offers a “fine exploration of marriage and the complex minds of ‘lost children’—that is, all of us” (The New York Times Book Review). “Compelling . . . A quietly devastating portrait of the way identity crumbles when you’ve nothing, or no one, to pin it to.” —The Guardian

Signs for Lost Children

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Let rich men have their games: it is entertaining if not edifying for the rest of us to see how like the daydreams of little girls are the trappings of masculine wealth.

There is always endurance as there is always air, because there is no alternative.

Annie speak of men whose sympathy for women's suffrage lasts only until they find themselves obliged to pour their own tea.

It is a mausoleum, it is the inverse of Noah's Ark.

“That, as we know, the majority of patients are female, and many of their troubles begin in exactly those crises of life where it is most desirable that women should be attended by women…”

Mamma never understood the power of courtesy, or that not every battle needs to be fought every time. Feminine wiles, Mamma would say, the cowardly tactics of those who fear the judgements of fools and care more for worldliness than salvation. Did the Son of God depend on toadying and sweet words? Did he fear to offend the money-lenders in the temple?

 Although of course contrition is often taken to excess, especially in women. And self-awareness, she has often thought, is a marker of sanity but not of happiness.

Here is beauty in time, in the turning of the trees, the rising and falling of the water, in the slow breathing of this land.

And in your view, she wants to ask, is Mrs Minhinnet mad or only damaged? Is she, in fact, telling truths that no-one wants to hear? Because if, she sometimes thinks, if all the women in here who speak of indecent things, who recount endlessly obscene acts and unnatural couplings, are speaking from unhappy experience, then their madness may be perfectly reasonable. May be the inevitable response of a healthy mind to things that should not happen. And if that is the case, then the primary problem is not so much with the minds of some women as with the acts of some men. Older men, almost invariably. Men with power. 

Who among us is not haunted? Who does not walk in the shadow of those who are not here? Our dead are always with us and yet always lost. Only those who die young, she thinks, will not be inhabited by dead voices, by shadowy glimpses of figures long fallen to dust. Ghosts await you in the future if they do not follow you from the past. There is no clear border between insanity and grief, no basis for a limit to the permis- sible time of mourning, A time to reap, a time to sow, she thinks. Mrs Ashton is caught in the season of grief. Time passes, but there are many purposes under heaven that find no season here.

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