Böcker av Lisa Appignanesi

Mad, bad and sad. From the depression suffered by Virginia Woolf and Sylvia Plath to the mental anguish and addictions of iconic beauties Zelda Fitzgerald and Marilyn Monroe. From Freud and Jung and the radical breakthroughs of psychoanalysis to Lacan's construction of a modern movement and the new women-centred therapies. This is the story of how we have understood mental disorders and extreme states of mind in women over the last two hundred years and how we conceive of them today, when more and more of our inner life and emotions have become a matter for medics and therapists.

`The small translucent bottle of shampoo outlived him. It was the kind you take home from hotels in distant places. For over a year it had sat on the shower shelf where he had left it. I looked at it every day.'

"[A work of] wit, wisdom and richness... A grand tour of derangement, from matricide to anorexia." -John Leonard, Harper's

This book journeys into the heart of dark passions and the crimes they impel. When passion is in the picture, what is criminal, what sane, what mad or simply bad?Brighton, 1870: A well-respected spinster infuses chocolate creams with strychnine in order to murder her lover's wife.Paris, 1880: A popular performer stalks her betraying lover through the streets of the city for weeks and finally takes aim.New York, 1906: A millionaire shoots dead a prominent architect in full view of a theatre audience.Through court and asylum records, letters and newspaper accounts,this book brings to life a period when the psychiatric professions were consolidating their hold on our understanding of what is human. An increasingly popular press allowed the public unprecedented insight into accounts of transgressive sexuality,savage jealousy and forbidden desires. With great story-telling flair, Lisa Appignanesi teases out the vagaries of passion and the clashes between the law and the clinic as they stumble towards a (sometimes reviled) collaboration. Sexual etiquette and class roles, attitudes to love, madness and gender, notions of respectability and honour, insanity and lunacy, all are at play in that vital forum in which public opinion is shaped - the theatre of the courtroom.

Half a century after the publication of The Feminine Mystique, have women really exchanged purity and maternity to become desiring machines inspired only by variations of sex, shopping and masochism - all coloured a brilliant neuro-pink?In this volume, fifty women young and old - writers, politicians, actors, scientists, mothers - reflect on the shades that inspired them and what being woman means to them today. Contributors include: Margaret Atwood, Joan Bakewell, Bidisha, Lydia Cacho, Shami Chakrabarti, Lennie Goodings, Linda Grant, Natalie Haynes, Siri Hustvedt, Kathy Lette, Kate Mosse, Pussy Riot, Bee Rowlatt, Elif Shafak, Ahdaf Soueif, Sandi Toksvig, Natasha Walter, Timberlake Wertenbaker Jeanette Winterson - alongside the three editors.

As her mother slipped into the darkness of old age, Lisa Appignanesi began to realise how little she knew of the reality behind the tales she had heard since childhood. She had shunned her parents' stories of war-time Poland, but now she set out to find the truth. In her quest she flew to Warsaw - imagining and revisiting a past she never knew.This is the moving story of the Jews who survived outside the camps, but it is also the author's own voyage of self-discovery - a family memoir of the rites of passage of emigration, childhood, and growing up an outsider in a closed community

A brave and brilliantly researched intellectual history of the relationship between women and mental illness since 1800.

Simone de Beauvoir (1908-1986) always stood in the shadow of her lover and teacher, Jean-Paul Sartre, despite the fact that she was a brilliant writer and philosopher in her own right. Her monumental study "The Second Sex" made her a cult figure of the Feminist movement.