A Secret Madness: A Story of a Marriage - Softcover

Elaine Bass is 84 years old. She has two children and lives with her second husband in Norfolk. This is her first book.

The writing is brilliantly evocative of an era when the effects of rationing were commonplace, when there was still National Service and BBC radio plays were an evening's entertainment. -- Angela Cooke * Daily Express * What's she's achieved is quite remarkable... no ordinary book. -- Sue Cooke * Woman's Weekly * This is a study in saintly forbearance, but also in the innocence of a time that knew little of Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, was shocked by sexual deviance, and when the Freudian precepts we take for granted were not yet in place. -- Lesley White * Sunday Times Culture * A Secret Madness is a poignant and brave account of a marriage struggling to survive against the dark shadows of an illness for which there is still no cure. Essential reading for anyone attempting to understand and cope with OCD. -- Shereen Low * Birmingham Post * A superb, tragic period piece. -- Ian Samson * The Guardian * There are valuable lessons for many of us in her book. -- Dr Thomas Stuttaford * The Times (T2) * Drawing on her vivid recollections, Bass has written a powerfully compelling book that captures the searing loneliness of a marriage to a man trapped within his illness. -- Julie Wheelwright * Independent * This gripping, moving and obsessively readable book will ring bells with anyone who's ever had a 'difficult marriage'. * Fay Weldon * It's a harrowing and thought-provoking book, and should cure any nostalgia for the way we lived in the fifties. The reader feels the author's lonely plight acutely. And one must admire a woman, isolated and unsupported, who uses her own intelligence to construct sense in the strange and frightening world into which her marriage took her. And one who has such emotional stamina. * Hilary Mantel *