Sophia Lynch made her fiction debut with the story “Rendering,” in the Department of First Stories of EQMM’s January/February 2024 issue. The story turns around a life model who agrees to a private session at an artist’s home—a situation with inherent potential for sinister developments and suspense. The author herself has worked as a life model and studio assistant. She’s currently immersed in her first novel, while also producing a handful of new short stories which she describes as “about strange people doing appalling things.” In this post she discusses her interest, as a crime-fiction writer, in finding the relatable within the criminal.   —Janet Hutchings

I remember the first time I encountered the phrase madwoman in the attic. I was fourteen, watching the pilot episode of the crime series Cracker, conveniently titled “The Mad Woman in the Attic.” For those who know the show, fourteen may seem a tad young to be exposed to its central themes of violence, addiction and adultery, not to mention the grim dealings of the Greater Manchester Police in the nineties, and I can’t argue with that. But the house rule in those days was that if a TV series or film was a little . . . rough, but also well-written and acted I could watch it under parental supervision. In other words, as long as it was British I was all set.

Cracker appealed to my state of mind at fourteen (Anglophilic and cynical). There was something glorious about those thick Northern accents and all the bad perms and stone-washed jeans against a backdrop of industrial decay, but most of all the razor-sharp and unexpectedly compassionate intelligence of its psychologist protagonist, Dr. Edward “Fitz” Fitzgerald, portrayed by the late Robbie Coltrane. Others of my generation will invariably remember Coltrane as Hagrid, the friendly, half-giant groundskeeper from the Harry Potter movies, but to me he will always be the abrasive, half-in-the-bag, Glaswegian Fitz.

At that point I hadn’t really thought about being a professional writer, but I was positive that I would become a forensic psychologist. Criminal psychology fascinated me. Where it originates, what it hides, what it allows, the stories that it writes. Episodes of Cracker appealed to me especially because they are not “whodunits” but “whydunits,” many of which relate to prior experiences of psychological trauma. Within the first twenty minutes of almost every episode the audience is provided with a clear picture of who commits the crime and how they do it, but what we’re really here for is the criminal’s story. This waits for us on the other side of a locked door that cannot be brutalized or bullied open. The key to it is understanding.

When we are introduced to Fitz’s methods in the first episode of the series, he references this locked door directly as he attempts to extract a confession from a suspect claiming to have amnesia. “Nobody ever loses their memory,” the psychologist says to his subject. “It gets locked away like a mad woman in the attic. Occasionally you hear her scream, but you don’t unlock the door and have a look. Right?”

Like a mad woman in the attic. The use of simile seemed to imply that madwomen might be commonplace in attics, that every house might have one stashed away up there. At the time I had no knowledge of the similarly titled 1979 work of feminist literary criticism by Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, nor had I read the fictional inspiration of Gilbert and Gubar’s examination, Charlotte Bronte’s 1847 novel Jane Eyre. But my ear caught and cradled the disturbing phrase all the same, because it echoed the imagery of another mystery story that had always frightened and fascinated me: The Adventure of the Copper Beeches by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, which first appeared in print in 1892.

While there are many of the original Sherlock Holmes stories that I am fond of and whose cleverness and Victorian oddity delights me, The Copper Beeches is one that I find genuinely chilling. It evolves from the “strange experience” of Violet Hunter, a governess who accepts a position at a rural estate working for the Rucastles, a family that can at best be described as eccentric (father is weirdly fixated on her hair, mother is pale and unsmiling, son comes across like a young Jeffry Dahmer). She is not subjected to any “actual ill-treatment” at the hands of her employers, until she ventures upstairs into a seemingly uninhabited wing of the house and encounters a barricaded door, behind which she senses someone moving around. In relating the details of her experience to Holmes, Violet mentions hearing footsteps and seeing a shadow beneath the “sinister door”. There is nothing inherently horrific about these details—they aren’t a witchy laugh or the sound of scratching. Yet they are carefully chosen by Doyle, and disturbing enough to send Miss Hunter fleeing downstairs with his readers close on her heels. “A mad, unreasoning terror rose up in me at the sight, Mr. Holmes,” she says.

Violet’s terror and ours is, as Fitz would say, understandable. Empty, dark, shut-up rooms are creepy enough, and empty, dark, shut-up rooms that are barricaded from the outside and then turn out not to be empty at all are fight-or-flight territory. What kind of person gets locked behind a “sinister door” anyway? Not a normal person, that’s for sure. Not someone who bathes or brushes their teeth, because you need plumbing for that and most disused wings of old English estates probably don’t have plumbing. Definitely someone hideous, someone harboring a gruesome plot to break out in the middle of the night and murder everyone in their beds. And assuming Violet Turner had read her Bronte, that’s certainly where her mind would have gone when she sensed movement behind that barred door.

Of course, even outside that specific literary context, the thought of a hidden occupant of a barricaded room who moves about in there and offers no explanation for herself is eerie enough (there’s a reason so many people stayed up all night shopping for home security systems after that Netflix series about phrogging aired). It’s all very well for danger to be outside, as we all know it is. But when, as the urban legend puts it, the call is found to be coming from inside the house, the tables are unsettlingly turned.

Had The Adventure of the Copper Beeches been written as a horror story, we might be content to remain unsettled. But it’s a mystery, and we want at the story, the motive, the humanity, the why.So at this point I will repeat my earlier question: What kind of a person gets locked behind a “sinister door,” anyway?

This time I will allow my rational mind rather than my fight-or-flight impulse to answer: In Victorian England, most likely a person who is female. More specifically, a female person whose existence threatens the ability of a male person to hold onto power. In the case of Charlotte Bronte’s antiheroine, Bertha Mason, it is Rochester’s wish to remarry that motivates him to keep his current (unsuitable) wife under lock and key. In the case of Alice Rucastle, the unwilling occupant of the shuttered wing at The Copper Beeches, it is her father’s desire for control over her late mother’s estate that results in her imprisonment. Both suffer from somewhat vague forms of mental illness, although Bertha’s “madness” is reported to predate her confinement, while Alice’s diagnosis of “brain fever” (a common Victorian euphemism for a nervous breakdown) is directly provoked by her father’s abuse. Regardless of the actual threat that these women may or may not pose to the outside world, their custodians’ fear of them is, somewhat ironically, rooted in their own terror of being confined by the laws of society. And it is in attempting to avoid these constraints by reducing their female captives to subhuman pieces of baggage that their own inhumanity is revealed. 

It’s tempting to dismiss both Rochester’s and Rucastle’s actions as merely monstrous and therefore unsympathetic. However, my inner Fitz nags at me to dig for the relatable within the criminal. Say we attempt to see these women as their custodians do. What are they representative of to them? Indiscretions. Stories they are reluctant to tell. Sources of ruination, of chaos, of disorder. Uncomfortable feelings. Repressed memories. Most of us harbor multiple examples of of these things at any given moment. Most of us have attempted, at some time or another, to lock them away. And when we do, they go mad. For the determined captors among us this escalation is met only with blind fear and an attempt at increased security (a metal bar across the door, a mastiff set to roam the grounds below). For the investigators, it provokes a test of compassion, the search for what is understandable within that which presents as purely threatening. 

For all our attempts at understanding, I can’t imagine an instance in literature or film where a madwoman in the attic will not come across as at least vaguely threatening. After all, unlike skeletons in the closet, madwomen have voices. They have noises to make, tales to tell, tales that might prove sympathetic. They have agendas. Once free, there’s no telling what they might do. They might run off to Southampton to marry their true love. Then again, they might burn the house down. Given what they’ve been through, it could easily go either way. Of course, as with the criminal mind itself, this is what makes them fascinating, what makes us want to let them out and listen to what they have to say, despite how bad their breath might be or what havoc they might wreak. Or perhaps more likely because of that. 

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“The Mad Woman in the Attic”. Cracker: Season One, written by Jimmy McGovern, directed by Michael Winterbottom, Granada Television, 1993.

Gilbert, Sandra M. and Gubar, Susan. The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth Century Literary Imagination. Yale University Press, 2000.

Bronte, Charlotte. Jane Eyre. Penguin, 2006.

Doyle, Arthur Conan. The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (Illustrated and Annotated): The Adventure of the Copper Beeches. Solis, 2020.