The Book of Falling Women
Lives Turned Upside Down
Format:Hardback
Publisher:Vintage Publishing
Publishing:18th Feb '27
£18.99
This title is due to be published on 18th February, and will be despatched as soon as possible.
'Extraordinary, brave, and strikingly inventive, Hay’s book... shows us not just why we fall, but the vital mechanics of how we stand up again' - Vesna Goldsworthy
'Disconcerting, original and exceptionally courageous' - Miranda Seymour
'A true work of art' - Tiffany Watt Smith
What does it mean to fall? To feel fragile, vulnerable, exposed? To find a way – if you can – of getting up, and beginning again?
In January 2020, scholar and literary historian Daisy Hay fell and hit her head. For more than a year afterwards she moved through the world in a state of persistent wrongness. The ground refused to stay still, and to be perpendicular to it became a difficult thing.
As she gradually righted herself, she began to see falling everywhere, but particularly among the women of the turbulent late eighteenth century: the period in which she had always felt most at home. It was there in Jane Austen, in whose novels young women fall spectacularly. It was there in the actress Sarah Siddons, whose tragic swoons made her the sensation of the London stage. Above all, it was there in the autobiographical writing of Hester Thrale, who reclaimed the act of falling as she wrote its story anew. This was a period when a great many brilliant women fell (and felt) differently. They fell when they could not speak. They fell in and out of love. They fell onto the pages of history, and sometimes they flagrantly fell out.
These women made art at the cusp of modernity. A highly original cultural history, The Book of Falling Women explores their stories alongside a memoir of a life turned upside down.
Ingenious, compulsive and absolutely stunning, Daisy Hay interweaves the lives of a daring group of 18th century women with her own unfolding crisis, to create a deeply original and unsettling investigation of what it means to have a mind, and a body, and to feel in possession of both. A true work of art. -- Tiffany Watt Smith
With great acumen and insight, Daisy Hay takes us on an enthralling journey through the minds and bodies of 18th century women and her own. This is a brave book rich in medical history, current diagnostic practice and the still mysterious ills humans undergo. -- Lisa Appignanesi
What happens when a brilliant young academic is literally felled by a mysterious illness? Daisy Hay provides the answer in a disconcerting, original and exceptionally courageous book. As a scholar who specialises in the late eighteenth century, Hay has discovered many ways in which women could fall - spectacular onstage swoons, offstage elopements - including the inadvertent physical plunge from which Dr Johnson's long-suffering patron Hester Thrale bore the scars with pride. Their stories are counterpointed by /with Hay's own disorientating experiences with wit and elegance by one of our finest literary historians. -- Miranda Seymour
Daisy Hay’s masterly blend of memoir and cultural history achieves far more than the sum of its parts—it reshapes how we view an experience we think we instinctively understand. Extraordinary, brave, and strikingly inventive, Hay’s book maps her own vulnerabilities alongside the lives of eighteenth-century women. It shows us not just why we fall, but the vital mechanics of how we stand up again. -- Vesna Goldsworthy
An extraordinarily wise and eloquent book, inspired by the author’s experience of a catastrophic fall and her uneven, uncertain recovery from it, that urges us to see both life and literature from an entirely new perspective. -- Claire Harman
ISBN: 9781784745233
Dimensions: 222mm x 138mm x 30mm
Weight: 449g
272 pages