Sulla pazzia

"The number of those who actually do go insane is small. For Barbara Taylor, the trouble began when she got it into her head that her dissertation was going to be, in a literary sense, really good. Then a doctoral candidate in history at the University of Sussex in England, Taylor was writing about the Owenites, a minor group of nineteenth-century English utopians. As a socialist, a feminist, and a Canadian, she felt an affinity for these obscure and decent people. However, she didn’t know just what to say about them, which caused her great anxiety. This situation lasted for months, with the anxiety getting worse. Finally, in a scene reminiscent of the Muses inspiring a poet, her idea came to her, with dazzling suddenness; in her memoir, The Last Asylum: A Memoir of Madness in Our Times (University of Chicago, $20), Taylor dates the epiphany to a November evening in 1977, “at about eleven.” James Camp, bookforum.

Potrebbe essere l'inizio di un romanzo, no?