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This is the story of a young woman, Monica Prystal, whose husband, after sixteen years of unperturbed marital happiness, falls prey to alcohol and the charms of other women. To this unfortunate turn of events, the heroine reacts with a miscarriage and a subsequent
state of psychopathology, the exact nature of which the reader is left to guess. Its fictional function is to justify Mr. Prystal's commitment of his wife to a series of mental hospitals. The first two are private institutions, whose description makes one wonder whether the doctors had not, under duress, changed places with the patients as in Poe's famous story. The third is a state hospital which, contrary to the heroine's and the reader's expectations, proves a boon for the unhappy victim. The administration is not interested in extorting exorbitant fees from her husband, and the completely restored Monica returns to freedom. She re-enters the world of bath salts, permanent waves and nail polish, stripped of her infatuation with her scoundrel of a husband, but equipped with a brand-new social conscience, particularly as regards conditions in mental institutions.
The blurb says that the author 'quarried the material … from firsthand investigations of many mental hospitals in a western state'. Emily Harvin is a nom de plume 'to protect certain factual asylum officials [whose ill-treatment of patients she observed with her own eyes] from embarrassing publicity'. It is furthermore stated that 'this novel … is founded on factual conditions. The highly significant x-rays of a case investigated by the writer [while serving as deputy and assistant to an administrative officer of the Department of Institutions of a western state] are in the writer's files, together with pertinent legal depositions, notarized affidavits, transcripts of court proceedings, and photostatic reproductions of public records.'
These explicit statements make it all the more incomprehensible why these officials, who apparently are