Kew Asylum, when it opened in 1872, was the larger of two public institutions in wider Melbourne that housed people with mental illness. Grand and imposing, it opened a few years after the overcrowded Yarra Bend Asylum.
A new historical novel, set at Kew Asylum in 1890s Melbourne, prises open this world – inviting contemporary readers into the taboo subjects of women’s mental breakdown and institutional confinement, through a same-sex romantic love story.
