first edition Hardcover
1958 · New York
by Robinson, Alice M.
New York: The Macmillan Company. Very Good+ in Very Good dj. 1958. First Edition. Hardcover. [light shelfwear to book, front endpaper is corner-clipped; the jacket is a little edgeworn, with a short closed tear and associated diagonal crease at top left corner of front panel, old internal tape-repair at top of spine, a couple of tiny nicks at edges of rear panel]. Novel about a female patient at a state mental hospital. The author, per the jacket blurb, was "one of the country's leading psychiatric nurses," and at the time of the book's publication was Director of Nursing Education at the Vermont State Hospital in Waterbury, Vermont (which had previously been known as the Vermont State Asylum for the Insane). In her Preface to the book (her first novel), she writes: "I believe in compassionate love as the healing balm for the gaping emotional wounds which have broken our mental patients. I believe in this over and above the 'mechanical' psychiatric treatments as we know them. Thus I write of Laurie -- her illness, her experience with life, and her response to a warm and meaningful series of relationships." . (Inventory #: 26772)