Full title: The Woman Who Wrote her Way out of a Tomb: Forgotten Novels of the Nineteenth-Century U.S. Asylum System

Almost a century before sociologist Erving Goffman described “total institutions”— establishments where a population of inmates are subjected to strict regimens and discipline that nearly inevitably result in predictable patterns of abuse, neglect, and survival—an American children’s author, Martha Eugenia Berry, similarly theorized the U.S. asylum system, after she was forcibly confined to one for years on the directive of a single physician.  Her two novels about asylums, part of her long effort to abolish the asylum system, have been overlooked by scholarship, but provide insight into the tenacity of institutional power, the limits of reform, and the rise of both psychiatry and the concept of privacy in the United States.