An historical fiction novel that examines the lives of Richard Dadd and Charlotte Brontë and the ways in which their art and approaches to life as an artist overlapped and reflected each other.

This novel was a bit of an odd one. Richard Dadd was an up and coming painter in the 1820s-1830s who suffered some sort of mental breakdown while on a tour of Europe and the Holy Land, murdered someone, and ended up in Bedlam. Krueger fictionalizes his life up until the murder and juxtaposes it with a year in Charlotte Brontë's life just after the publication of [Villette], while she attempts to decide what to do with an offer of marriage she's received. Both story arcs are well-constructed and the prose is beautiful and richly detailed. But other than the occasional commonality, the twin narratives didn't really feed off each other very well. It also didn't help that while Dadd's narrative is given the higher page count, I didn't find him very sympathetic and constantly was wishing for more of Charlotte's. May be more of a hit with readers who enjoy considering the artistic process, what makes an artist, and the Victorian era. ( )

Interesting conjecture about what would happen if writer Charlotte Bronte and mad murderer Richard Dadd met. The story opens with scenes from Bedlam, a psychiatric hospital where Dadd is a patient and Bronte a visitor was interesting. Tidbits about Charles Dicken reflect another aspect of the period. While the language was appropriate and the culture portray realistically, there was little depth to the characters. Dadd was mentally ill. Bronte quest as a writer is overshadowed by her role as wife. The various stages of their lives were awkwardly joined making the plot difficult to follow at times.

LibraryThing Member Giveaway randomly chose me to receive this book. Although encouraged, I was under no obligation to write a review. The opinions I have expressed are my own. ( )

The idea that great art exacts a great price is common. Perhaps we like the idea of the tortured artist because it makes it easier for us to be content with our lesser talents. We may not be geniuses, but at least we aren’t Van Gogh, or Sylvia Plath, or in the story of Mad Richard , Richard Dadd and Charlotte Brontē.

Author Lesley Krueger begins her book with a meeting between Dadd and Brontē after Dadd is institutionalized a criminally insane after committing a murder. This meeting is the rationale for weaving their narratives together. Most of Dadd’s story is told retrospectively, the story of how he came to be in Bedlam while Brontē’s story continues from that meeting.

Brontē’s story is interesting and compelling. She is the last surviving child, Branwell, Emily, and Anne having died just a few years earlier. Her father is old and frail. She is past what people consider “marriageable” and her only suitor is someone her father thinks beneath her, his former curate. She wants marriage though maybe not to the curate. Brontē was one of Sady Doyle’s trainwrecks in her magnificent book on how we judge women. In Krueger’s book, Brontē has an inner core of strength that challenges her father and seeks what just might be happiness, but can she write and be happy?

Dadd’s story is that of a favorite son whose artistic talent is fostered by a doting and truly interesting father. His father is far more interesting than Richard, but Richard achieved some fame, not just for being a murderer, but for his art. With his father’s support and his real skill, he is beginning to make a name for himself as an artist. He founded The Clique, a group of artists who focused on genre painting and were known for rejecting Academic Art and hating the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. He knew and was known by most of the artistic elite and knew Charles Dickens since childhood. Life would have gone well for him, but he went on this nine month tour of Europe, the Levant, and Egypt and returned mentally ill. He believes he had a revelation, his family thinks he had sunstroke. Probably modern science would say he had schizophrenia.

Lesley Krueger is a skilled writer and creates a good sense of time and place. I enjoyed her Brontē narrative quite a bit. I was bored, though, by the Dadd narrative. I considered quitting the book altogether but when I considered how far I had already read, I kept going, but with a “why am I reading this?” refrain in the back of my head. The Brontē story was disciplined and focused on what took the story forward. The Dadd narrative was expansive and included everything, even the kitchen sink. The contrast could not be more stark. With Dadd we were given excruciating family details and goings-on while with Brontē, even the famed siblings were incidental, though in her thoughts. When I finished the book, I discovered that Krueger’s husband is a descendant of Dadd’s uncle which explained the impulse to indulge in the family stories. It makes for good family history, but not compelling fiction.

The question of what price art is not answered by this book. Dadd did not fall ill because he was an artist. His unartistic younger brother became mentally ill as well, though thankfully was institutionalized before killing someone. His sister, possibly suffering from postpartum depression tried to kill her baby. She was not an artist either. Brontē did not die because she was an artist. It is implied that she did not write more books because she was happy, but that is speculating far beyond the evidence.

My dislike of Mad Richard does not mean I think Krueger is a poor writer. I think she effectively created multi-dimensional characters. The time and place felt authentic and fully realized. She excelled at describing the setting, the rush and clamor of the souk and the expansive light of the desert, for example.If she had edited the Dadd narrative with the kind of scalpel she edited Brontē, this might have been an excellent book.

I was provided a e-galley of Mad Richard by the publisher.

https://tonstantweaderreviews.wordpress.com/2017/05/28/9781770413566/ ( )

Mad Richard is Richard Dadd, an artist in the Victorian age. He was a real person, and he showed great promise. Which was good; his father had decided that was what Richard would do. Another son he directed to take over the pharmacy; another was consigned to manual labor. Richard’s father was a bit of a control freak where his children were concerned. We first meet Dadd in the Bethlem Royal Hospital-the infamous Bedlam asylum- in 1853, when he meets Charlotte Bronte, also, obviously, a real person. The meeting, however, is artistic license. Charlotte is visiting Bedlam- and some prisons and poor houses as well- to gather information for a ‘social issues’ novel she is thinking about writing. This short visit is what the novel hinges on.

The rest of the book alternates between Dadd’s life and Bronte’s. We follow Dadd from his childhood, through art school, and his association with The Clique, a small group of fellow artists who shared his ideals. All seems well, until his father badgers him into going with a rich patron to Egypt as the trip’s illustrator. It is on this trip, which Richard had not wanted to go on, that mental illness strikes.

Meanwhile, Bronte is immured in the rural home of her father. All her siblings are dead and she suffers from unrequited love; she wonders what the rest of her life will be like. Should she continue as she has and be lonely, or settle for a man who is agreeable but who she does not love?

Both Bronte’s and Dadd’s stories are interesting, but I never did figure out what really united them, other than that they both had overbearing fathers and were very creative. Bronte wrote about average people; Dadd painted fairies.

While I didn’t understand the pairing, the writing itself I found wonderful. It’s full of details of mid-1800’s middle class and rural life, as well as of the artistic life. Krueger lets us see into the minds of her protagonists. The story is populated with other Victorian creative types; Dickens, Augustus Egg, Elizabeth Gaskell, and Wilkie Collins are all part of the crew. Everything comes to life realistically under Krueger’s hand. ( )

This was a Goodreads giveaway.

I am a fan of historical fiction, so this novel, which imagines the inner and outer lives of both artist Richard Dadd and novelist Charlotte Bronte, appealed to me. The author imagines a meeting between the pair, which serves (only) as a starting point for the comparison of the two figures, and also serves as a jumping off place for the author's themes of the artistic temperament, the life and challenges of an artist, the relationships both familial and other, which both enrich and strain an artist's ability to excel at their art, etc. Their meeting takes place at the beginning of the novel, which is the sort of end of the story for Dadd, while it is the beginning of Bronte's narrative. The novel alternates between the stories of both artists.

As an exploration into the artistic temperament and the familial and practical challenges to that art, this is an interesting book. There is also the interesting theme of the male vs female artist and how one's gender influences one's art and provides different challenges, restraints, and constraints to that art.

I found Charlotte Bronte's story to be more compelling than Dadd's, though his is presumably the chief storyline here. His history is episodic, jumping back and forth in time. This was, to be honest, one of my peeves about this book. The Dadd part of the narrative was disjointed temporally, jumping back and forth between time periods of the artist's history, starting when he was a boy, jumping forward to his artistic studies in London, back again, forward, back some more. The episodes themselves did not hold my interest greatly. They are meant, I believe, to illuminate the nature of the relationship between Dadd and his father and serve as a tragic contrast to his later madness, as well as build a picture of the artist as a young man.

I found the Charlotte Bronte episodes to be more linear, and therefore less confusing, as well as more interesting in and of themselves. Perhaps this is due to the influence my gender has on the sympathies I have for the characters. There was, however, more of a sense from the very beginning of her narrative of a plot-driven arc, a beginning, middle and end to her story, with a clear conflict, working out of that conflict, and resolution, whereas Dadd's did not seem to have that structure. (Unfortunately, the denoument to Bronte's story occurs offstage, which is disappointing.) ( )