The Mad Wife

Meagan Church writes historical fiction with a scalpel. The Mad Wife is a book about a woman — but more accurately, it’s about the cost of a woman trying to survive inside systems that would rather crush her than hear her speak.

Set in an era when “madness” was both a diagnosis and a weapon, the novel traces the slow suffocation of female agency. Church does not sensationalize the horrors of institutionalization — she anatomizes them. Page by page, she peels away the polite veneers of medical respectability and reveals what they often masked: misogyny, fear, profit, punishment.

What gives this novel its emotional voltage is how Church resists the temptation to turn her heroine into a symbol. She keeps her human. Flawed. Angry. Tender. Sometimes confused. The question is not just “Is she mad?” It’s the more haunting ethical question: “Who benefits if she is declared mad?”

Church writes with clarity and velocity — there is a thriller’s pulse under the historical canvas — but she also allows silence and dread to build. She understands that the most terrifying thing is not the asylum door slamming shut; it’s every small, reasonable-sounding step that leads to that door.

By the time the novel delivers its revelations, you feel the ground move not because of any outrageous twist, but because of the cumulative weight of injustice. It stings precisely because it stays plausible.