Book review: The Unravelling of Mary Reddish by David Whitfield

Beneath the stiff manners and polished respectability of Georgian society lay a quieter, more insidious cruelty. It lived in locked rooms and lowered voices, in diagnoses delivered as verdicts, and in a culture eager to label disobedience as an illness. In an age obsessed with order and morality, the mind itself became a battleground, particularly for women whose thoughts refused to behave. It is within this world of rigid expectations and fragile reputations that The Unravelling of Mary Reddish takes shape. Not a simple tale of madness, but as a chilling examination of who is permitted to be sane, and at what cost. 

There is something deeply unsettling about novels that centre on madness, not because insanity itself is frightening, but because it forces us to confront how fragile identity, truth, and justice really are. The Unravelling of Mary Reddish is a novel steeped in this discomfort. David Whitfield does not offer the reader the safety of distance or easy judgement; instead, he drags into the claustrophobic interior of a woman’s mind and asks an agonising question: when a society decides you are mad, does your sanity matter at all?

Set against the rigid moral framework of the Georgian era, Whitfield’s novel is as much about power and control as it is about psychology. Mary Reddish is not a sensationalised ‘madwoman in the attic’ figure, nor is she a convenient gothic monster. She is disturbingly human. From the outset, Whitfield makes it clear that this story is not about whether Mary has done something wrong, but about who gets to define guilt, responsibility, and reason. 

What makes the novel compelling is its refusal to draw clear lines. Mary is an unreliable narrator, but not in the modern gimmicky sense. Her unreliability feels organic, born from trauma, repression, and the suffocating expectations placed upon women. Whitfield captures the grinding pressure of Georgian respectability with a precision that feels almost cruel. Every silence, every sideways glance, every unspoken accusation tightens around Mary like a noose. Madness here is not simply a medical condition; it is a social verdict. 

Whitfield’s prose is restrained but richly atmospheric. He does not rely on melodrama to generate tension. Instead, unease seeps in gradually, through small details and emotional fractures. A room feels too quiet. A conversation lingers too long. A memory refuses to stay fixed. This slow unravelling mirrors Mary’s psychological state and forces the reader to inhabit her uncertainty. At times, the novel feels less like a narrative unfolding and more like a mind circling its own fears, unable to escape. 

The Georgian setting is not merely decorative. It is essential to the novel’s moral weight. Whitfield clearly understands that insanity in this period was often a convenient label, particularly for women who failed to conform. Asylums loom over the story not as a place of healing, but as instruments of social order. The threat of confinement hangs over Mary constantly, and the reader becomes acutely aware that her fate may depend less on truth than on how convincingly she can perform ‘sanity’ to those in power. 

One of the novel’s greatest strengths is its exploration of how language itself becomes a weapon. Doctors, clergymen, and authority figures speak with confidence and certainty, while Mary’s voice is fragmented, questioned, and dismissed. Whitfield exposes how easily professional authority can slide into cruelty, and how quickly care becomes coercion. In this sense, the novel feels uncomfortably relevant. Though rooted in the nineteenth century, its questions about mental health, credibility, and institutional control resonate far beyond it. 

That said, The Unravelling of Mary Reddish is not an easy read, and it is not always a comfortable one. The pacing is deliberately measured, sometimes testing the reader’s patience. Those looking for dramatic twists or neat revelations may find the novel frustrating. Whitfield is far more interested in moral ambiguity than narrative payoff. Yet this feels intentional. The lack of clear resolution mirrors the reality faced by people like Mary, whose lives rarely ended in vindication or clarity. 

The novel’s central question – will Mary’s sanity save or condemn her? – is deliberately cruel. By the end, Whitfield makes it painfully clear that sanity itself is not a shield. In a society determined to control women’s bodies and minds, rationality can be reinterpreted as defiance, and defiance as illness. Mary’s greatest tragedy is not her potential madness, nor the trauma she endured, but the fact that her inner truth may never matter. 

Whitfield’s greatest achievement lies in how he implicates the reader. We are invited to analyse Mary, to look for signs, to judge her reliability, only to realise that we are participating in the same scrutiny that endangers her. The novel becomes a quiet indictment of our own appetite for diagnosis and explanation. We want to know what Mary is. Sane or insane, guilty or innocent. But Whitfield insists that this binary thinking is part of the problem. 

In the end, The Unravelling of Mary Reddish is not a story about madness alone. It is a story about fear. Fear of women who do not behave as expected, fear of minds that cannot easily be categorised, and fear of what happens when authorities decide the truth for us. It lingers long after the final page, not because it shocks, but because it unsettles. Like the best historical fiction, it reminds us that the past is not as distant as we would like to believe, and that the mechanism of control it exposes have not vanished, only changed their names. 

The Unravelling of Mary Reddish is available to buy online and at selected bookshops.