The Shutter of Snow (Faber Editions): 'Extraordinary.' Lucy Ellmann - Softcover

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Emily Holmes Coleman was born in California in 1899. On graduating from Wellesley College in 1920 she married the psychologist Loyd Ring Coleman. After the birth of her son John in 1924, she contracted puerperal fever and spent two months in a mental hospital, inspiring her only published novel, The Shutter of Snow (1930). In 1926 the family arrived in Paris, where Coleman became society editor for the Paris Tribune and began writing articles, stories, diaries and poems, as well as working as a secretary to anarchist Emma Goldman. She first met Djuna Barnes through the city's expatriate literary circles, then again in 1932 while staying at socialite Peggy Guggenheim's Hayford Hall, where Barnes wrote much of her famous novel Nightwood; Coleman was later instrumental in its publication by T. S. Eliot at Faber. She lived in Europe for the next two decades and converted to Catholicism in 1944. For the rest of her life Coleman was devoted to her religion and died at the radical pacifist Catholic Worker community in New York in 1974.

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Introduced by Claire-Louise Bennett, experience one new mother’s psychological journey in this lost 1930 foremother of Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar.

‘Astonishing and moving. A pretty amazing book.’ Tessa Hadley
‘Extraordinary. A fascinating and unexpected delight.’ Lucy Ellmann
‘Haunting and evocative, this is a timeless portrayal of madness.’ Catherine Cho
‘A startling, luminous and magnetic novel about the complexity of motherhood.’ Yiyun Li
‘With its deep musicality, Coleman’s unforgettable voice was years ahead of its time.’ Sinéad Gleeson
‘The most famous unknown of the century.’ Djuna Barnes, author of Nightwood

The only thing to do is to put hammers in the porridge and when there are enough hammers we shall break down the windows and all of us shall dance in the snow.

Some days, Marthe Gail believes she is God; others, Jesus Christ. Her baby, she thinks, is dead. The red light is shining. There are bars on the window. And the voices keep talking.

Time blurs; snow falls. The doctors say it is a breakdown; that this is Gorestown State Hospital. Her fellow patients become friends and enemies, moving between the Day Room and Dining Hall, East Hall and West Side, avoiding the Strong Room. Her husband visits and shows her a lock of her baby’s hair, but she doesn’t remember, yet – until she can make it upstairs, ascending towards release …

Shocking and hilarious, tragic and visceral, this experimental portrait of motherhood and mental illness written in 1930 has never felt more visionary.