LOWE, Louisa.

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The Bastilles of England; or, the Lunacy Laws at Work. First edition, an account of poor conditions in asylums and wrongful committal, informed by the author's personal experience. Lowe spent 18 months in various asylums after developing a keen interest in spiritualism. Upon her release, she campaigned to prevent others from undergoing the same ordeal. Louisa Lowe (c.1820-1907) was committed to a psychiatric hospital in 1870 by her husband, from whom she had recently separated. He cited her spiritualist beliefs as evidence that she was insane, and she was released only when his attempt to obtain control of her finances demanded a thorough assessment of her mental wellbeing. Upon her release, Lowe became an activist in the Lunacy Law Reform Association, for a time acting as its secretary.In The Bastilles of England, Lowe compares asylums with "the Bastilles of pre-revolutionised France" (p. 1), where "the victims of the lunacy system silently sink below the surface of society; they disappear one by one, and are forgotten" (p. 3). A particular focus is the social and legal inequality that made women vulnerable to wrongful committal by their male guardians. Lowe also describes humiliation at the hands of male medical staff, and argues that women would be better helped by female doctors and attendants. For these arguments she has been credited with "developing a feminist critique of the whole structure of Victorian psychiatry" (Showlater, p. 136).

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