“What She Left Behind” is an unforgettable story about two young women from different eras, Isabella Stone, called Izzy, and Clara Cartwright, both dealing with the trauma of mental illness under vastly different circumstances. Reaching through time, little has changed in the understanding of this illness, but when Isabelle is driven to find the truth about Clara’s life, and as it is revealed, it grabs hold of Izzy and forces her to take a hard look at herself.
In 1995 Izzy has been in foster care for the ten years since her mother shot her father in his sleep, and was admitted to a mental institution that Izzy never intends to visit, even if it means never seeing her mother again.
She less than thrilled when her foster mother, a museum employee, insists that she accompany her to Willard State Asylum to catalog the contents of abandoned luggage recently discovered in the attic. When Izzy finds un-mailed letters and a journal in one of the suitcases, she is touched by the contents of the journal, and feels compelled to find out what happened to this woman, since her heart wrenching diary entries are hardly the ramblings of a madwoman.
In 1929, Clara Cartwright, a defiant teenager, rages against her father when he separates her from the young Italian immigrant she has fallen in love with, and demands that she marry a man of her class whom she has no interest in. To teach her a lesson, her father has her admitted to The Long Island Home for Nervous Invalids, where she stays until her father’s fortune is lost in the financial crash of 1929. Suddenly without means, she is taken to a public institution and finds herself forgotten at the Willard State Asylum.
Ellen Marie Wiseman has brought these two eras and the struggles of mental illness to life in a way that will tear at your heart. A beautiful facade does not guarantee a pleasant interior, but how inhumanely patients were treated in an asylum of the 1920s and beyond, is beyond comprehension, and another alarming note is that many healthy women were locked away for years due to vengeful husbands and fathers.
The author points out that the Utica Crib, a locked wooden cage, was taken out of use in 1887, but insulin shock therapy was put into use in 1935 and electroshock therapy came into use in 1938.
Another horrifying fact is that between 1907 and 1963, 64,000 women in asylums, many who were not mentally ill, were forcibly sterilized due to the Eugenic Legislation in the US.
Read the book. It rings true.