Novelist Lisa Appignanesi will be visiting Haworth next week to talk about her new book Mad, Bad And Sad: A History Of Women And The Mind Doctors From 1800.

The event, taking place at the West Lane Baptist Centre on Wednesday at 2pm, forms part of the Bronte Parsonage Museum’s contemporary arts programme.

Mad, Bad And Sad explores the ways in which women’s mental disorders and states of mind have been understood since the 19th century, from the depression suffered by Virginia Woolf and Sylvia Plath to the mental anguish and addictions of iconic beauties Zelda Fitzgerald and Marilyn Monroe. The book also explores Charlotte Bronte’s use of madness in Jane Eyre, with its famous portrayal of Bertha Mason, the ‘madwoman in the attic’, drawing on Victorian ideas of madness.

The book has been shortlisted for the Samuel Johnson, the Warwick and the MIND prizes, and has won the Medical Journalist’s Award.

Polish-born Lisa Appignanesi is a novelist, writer, broadcaster, former deputy director of the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London, chairman of the Freud Museum and president of English PEN.

For more information about her talk, ring (01535) 640188.