Biography

Excerpt from Wellcome Library: "The life of Rosina Bulwer Lytton provides a fascinating insight into the attitudes towards women and mental health in the 19th century. Dismissed for years as the mad wife of the novelist and politician Edward Bulwer Lytton, Rosina was in fact a prolific author in her own right. Impressively, she had 14 books published. One of these, A Blighted Life, is a controversial personal memoir of her own experience. After she became estranged from Edward Bulwer Lytton in 1833, Rosina spent several years in France exiled from her children. On her return to England, she sought vengeance by publicly opposing him and threatened to ruin his political career. To silence her, in 1858 Edward had her committed ‘insane’. Under the supervision of Mr Robert Gardiner Hill, a British surgeon who specialised in the treatment of lunacy, she was incarcerated in a psychiatric hospital.

Despite the “fine” surroundings in which Rosina suddenly found herself, understandably she was enraged by her imprisonment. Sarah Wise in her book Inconvenient People: lunacy, liberty and the mad-doctors in Victorian England  describes Rosina’s case in detail. According to Wise, it is likely that Hill sent her to his private hospital, Inverness Lodge, a small but plush residence. Thanks to Rosina’s public profile, an outcry ensued and she was released after just three weeks at the request of her son. The preface to the 1880 edition of A Blighted Life describes her case as “a narrative of persecution of the most base and unmanly kind, practised by a wicked Man of great talent and resources, upon a Noble Lady, who had hardly anything to defend her but a high spirit, a consciousness of innocence, and a resolve not to be crushed”."