In this beautifully-crafted story, Benatar brings to life a character, Rachel, who feels the world and the creatures in it too strongly. She lived with a controlling, powerful mother so long that it warped her sensibility. From the introduction by John Carey, "among the griefs over other's suffering lodged deep in her memory is the death of the gentle young man in Paradise Street who had a club foot and kept the rabbit in the backyard, and was knocked down and killed when she was 10." These feelings...[are] "an index not of social maladjustment but of pathological hypersensitivity...Because she is so defenseless against the world's cruelty, she can only withdraw." Rachel, like us "disturbs, to put it bluntly, because Rachel, the mad narrator, is very like us. Admittedly, she takes things to extremes. Traits that we all recognize in ourselves are, in her case, blown up into intense inner (and sometimes public) dramas."

Rachel is mocked, used, and misunderstood by those around her. We wish her the best, and as her story advances, "We fear for her. Our hackles rise when others approach her. We harbor black suspicions about anyone who seems out to deceive her. Benatar encourages this paranoia in us by not letting us know about other people's motives" ... and we only"wish her 'safe at home.'" ( )

Sin pensárselo deja atrás su aburrida vida en Londres, se despide de su trabajo de oficinista y de su deprimente compañera de piso y se transforma de la noche a la mañana en la mujer que siempre quiso ser: devota del amor, la creatividad y la belleza, y siempre con una canción en los labios. Instalada en su nueva casa, Rachel contrata los servicios de un jardinero, empieza a escribir un libro e impresiona a todos con su optimismo insano. Sin embargo, a medida que Rachel se sumerge más y más en un mundo de lujo y de placeres, su entorno empieza a cuestionar lo excéntrico de su comportamiento y lo enfermizo de su euforia.

This is a first person account from a woman that is truly off her rocker. I don't know what her diagnosis would be today but Rachel Waring most definitely has a progressing mental illness throughout this story. To read this after Isabella Robinson's story (from Mrs. Robinson's Disgrace -- non-fiction) just made me feel the unjustness of that true tale even more as she never once showed real signs of madness. I didn't love this book but was glad to have read it as it was different from my usual reads.

http://webereading.com/2016/02/mental-health-and-victorian-or-modern.html ( )

Certainly a book not for the weak. This is a brilliant story that does involve insanity. Delusions run wild, just as the narrator voices exactly what we were thinking as well. But slip and slide we shall, and down to great depths of disrepair. Charming and evocative, this is a novel unfortunately rarely read. ( )

Picked this up at random on a library bookshelf and want to give myself a pat on the back for doing so. Benatar subtly handles the ever-increasing delusions of Rachel Waring in such as way that the reader can identify with and wish to defend and protect her. The only sense of place that is sharp and clear for the reader stems from Rachel's interior world. The "real" world is indistinct--so much so that I had to keep reminding myself that it was set in the 1980s and not decades earlier. I also had to give up trying to construct a solid visual of Rachel since her physical descriptions came solely from her own perception and those that are (possibly) trying to manipulate her.


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