Finally a well-timed republication of this 1930's cult classic. After giving birth to her son, Marthe is sent to an insane asylum for past-partum psychosis. What follows is a brilliant account of Marthe's own psyche during her stay. It doesn't always makes sense, but the gorgeous prose and the colourful characters certainly make up for it. Think Sylvia Plath meets 'One flew over the cuckoo's nest'. Based on the writer's own experience. Loved it!

It was brutally confronting and torturous but so very significant. Arguably the most perturbing and distressing prose I’ve ever read.
Unbelievably original, perceptive and courageous – boundary-shattering writing for 1930. Yet this work has defied time and stands as dramatic, disturbing, excruciating, and poignant as anything yielded by contemporary authors.

My thanks to NetGalley and Faber and Faber Ltd for granting this e-ARC in exchange for an honest review.

A welcome re-issue by Faber & Faber. Even almost a century after its original publication this is a classic that still feels surprisingly pertinent.

Written in the third person, from Marthe's perspective, in a dreamlike, continuous stream-of-consciousness prose-style, without speech marks or paragraph breaks, this is ultimately a feminist text in which Marthe's father, husband, Christopher, and the two male doctors in the account act merely as peripheral extras. The atmosphere of the setting in a mental hospital during the 1920s is palpably obvious and the way the author captures it is impressive.

Sadly, Claire-Louise Bennett's rather patchy Foreword detracts more from The Shutter of Snow than it adds. There are a few good moments, but mostly it feels like a piece in which Bennett is determined to show how much more she knows than is directly relevant to the present novel.

Many thanks to the publishers and to Netgalley for the ARC.

it feels disingenuous to say that this book is like if sally rooney had written 'the bell jar', when in fact 'the shutter of snow' precedes plath and rooney by decades. unfortunately, unlike most books ripe with Introspection and Conversation and Bonding In A Mental Asylum, this one didn't capture my attention as much as i wished it had. not even 200 pages, and still it took me almost a month to read. someone out there will surely appreciate this book, but it wasn't me.

This republication of this book was horrifying. It is a brutal account of life in an asylum by a young mother. The lack of care for the patients is heartbreaking, with this based on the author’s own experience. Told in a stream of consciousness it can be a little confusing or disorienting when reading, but this is a haunting and deeply uncomfortable book that shows the inhumane treatment of the time.

This republication of a 1930s novel by Faber has a gorgeous cover and an excellent and informative introduction from Claire-Louise Bennett. I appreciated the insight into the (lack of) care for new mothers experiencing postnatal psychosis in the early 20th century and found it both interesting and heartbreaking. But The Shutter of Snow was a tough read, because of the subject matter but also because of the experimental style. It moves in and out of narrative structures in a way that is probably representative of the protagonist’s condition, but isn’t the easiest to follow. Proceed with caution.

A brutal and extremely raw account of life in an asylum through the eyes of someone who is in there after suffering from poor mental health post partum. This was an incredible read that was both evocative and emotive as well as being intensely uncomfortable and yet at no point did I fwll like I should put the book down, I needed to witness Marthe and she needed to be witnessed.
All the more horrific because you know this is genuinely how people were treated.
A disturbing but important read

First published in the 1930s, and the author’s only novel, its republication is to be welcomed, although I didn’t find it an easy read. Marthe Gail has a post-partum mental breakdown and is hospitalised. This raw and unflinching account of her time in the asylum is based on the author's’ own experience and it’s a searing portrait of psychosis and its treatment. However I found the stream of consciousness and fragmented narrative style, however representative of the subject matter, disorientating to read, and after a while I found it tiresome. Well worth reading, though, as an insight into mental breakdown and medical practices of the time.

First published in the 1930's, this novel, written as a stream of consciousness, is a story told through the eyes of a woman, Marthé Gail, who is suffering from a manifestation of puerperal fever —toxic exhaustive psychosis—after giving birth to her son. She’s in a mental hospital with a number of other patients who have a variety of mental problems. She is given a variety of fairly horrific treatments including hydrotherapy, a straight jacket and other, presumably, standard treatments of the period.
An uncomfortable read, fascinating insight into the period, and while not easy, worth reading.

A welcome republication of The Shutter of Snow’s Emily Holmes Coleman’s only novel, here presented with an insightful introduction by author Claire-Louise Bennett. Published in 1930, it’s an oblique depiction of a particularly traumatic series of events that worked just as well for me as it did the first time I read it. It's based on the author's own experiences of her time in a psychiatric institution, not long after giving birth to her son. The Shutter of Snow’s primarily presented in a strikingly vivid, stream-of-consciousness style. The story’s told from the perspective of Marthe Gail, an inmate in a New York asylum; it’s often fragmented, elliptical, punctuated by drips and bursts of Marthe’s thoughts, her delusions mixing with memories and blurred perceptions of her surroundings. Shards of information rise to the surface and have to be pieced together, mirroring Marthe’s fractured, confused consciousness. I thought this tight focus on Marthe’s perspective worked brilliantly to convey the character’s shifting states of mind, what it might be like to be in her situation.

The end result’s a powerful piece of writing, moving from visceral to lyrical, with passages that have a slightly surreal, dream-like aspect. I was surprised too by the feminist narrative that slowly emerged. Men appear to hold all the cards here, the asylum doctors, Marthe’s husband, her forbidding father, but Marthe’s gradually woven into a diverse community of women and their collective isolation from a wider, patriarchal society, enables a subversive, unanticipated freedom and new forms of power.

Reading this, inevitably, reminded me of other representations of women and madness I’ve encountered, from Perkins Gilman’s earlier The Yellow Wallpaper, to later books like The Snake Pit, and Antonia White’s Beyond the Glass but Coleman’s treatment still felt fresh and unique. I can’t help wondering why she never published another novel, her life sounds as if it provided enough material for several: she worked with Emma Goldman, was part of a circle that included Djuna Barnes and Peggy Guggenheim, was close to writers like Dylan Thomas, T.S. Eliot and Antonia White, had an affair with poet George Barker, an unlikely, late marriage to a rancher from Arizona, and a final retreat into Catholicism - in her last days, cared for by nuns embedded in another cloistered community of women.

The Shutter of Snow is the fictitious account of Mrs Marthe Gail's time at a mental institute in the 1930s, when she had a breakdown after having her child and beleives she is God. The story, although fiction, is heavily based upon the writer's real life experience. of being committed to an insane asylum after suffering from puerperal fever and a nervous breakdown after giving birth. The writing is both haunting and disconcerting, especially in the beginning as Marthe is less lucid and experiences things in a very confusing, but often poetic way. The treatment of her and the other women in the asylum is appalling - and we're talking white, reasonably affluent women, with families and people who care for them. It broke my heart to see how these women were infantilized, treated like they could not possibly know any better, spoken to as if they were barely human at all. Of course, the text is very "of the time", but still its community of women shine in a way that is refreshingly feminist for the 1930s.

I was especially struck by the way Marthe describes things - her writing is more vivid and poetic the more unwell she is, slowly becoming clearer and more controlled. The experience reminded me of reading A Girl Is a Half-formed Thing by Eimear McBride (but much, much easier to follow!) and The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath.