Never Give Up by Miranda Millet

Hello Everybody,

This is the cover of my seventh novel, The Fairy Visions of Richard Dadd, first published by Peter Owen in 2013. Gordon and I have decided to reprint it to coincide with an exhibition next year at the Royal Academy: Richard Dadd Beyond Bedlam, from 25 July – 25 October 2026. The painting on the cover is, of course, Dadd’s strange and beautiful The Fairy Feller’s Masterstroke, now in Tate Britain. Of all the many people I’ve written about in my novels, Richard Dadd (1817 - 1886) is the one who has moved me most deeply.

He’s sometimes called an “outsider” artist but in fact he studied at the Royal Academy Schools, where he was taught by Maclise, Landseer and Turner and as a student he was a close friend of William Powell Frith, who was later enormously successful. Dadd was considered exceptionally talented and promising. His family couldn’t support him as an artist, as a young man he struggled to get commissions and was delighted to be offered the opportunity to accompany a solicitor on his Grand Tour to Italy and the Middle East, as his pet artist. This journey must have been fascinating, exhausting and confusing. Writing home to Frith, Richard said that when he lay down at the end of the day his imagination was “so full of wild vagaries that I have really and truly doubted of my own sanity.” He probably smoked hashish, and it is now known that drugs can trigger schizophrenic episodes in vulnerable young people. Richard imagined that he was being persecuted by evil spirits who took on various forms: a sea captain, an old lady in the Vatican galleries in Rome and became obsessed by the idea that he was a ‘catspaw’ of the Egyptian god Osiris.

On his return to London in the summer of 1843 Dadd’s behaviour became increasingly paranoid and his friends were worried about him. His father, Robert, was warned by a doctor at St Luke’s hospital that his son was dangerous, but Robert insisted that he knew his son better than anybody else and believed that a trip to the country would calm him down. They set out together for Cobham in Kent, to revisit the area where Richard had grown up. That night they went for a walk in the grounds of Cobham Park, where Richard stabbed and killed his father. He spent the rest of his life in Bedlam, or the Royal Bethlem Hospital, and was later moved to Broadmoor.

When I started to research this novel, I expected to find that at this time mental patients were treated abominably. But when I visited the Bedlam archives in Eden Park in Kent, I discovered that in 1853 a new young Resident Physician, Dr Charles Hood, was appointed and carried out a number of liberal reforms. He and the other doctors encouraged Dadd to paint and even collected his work.

While I was writing this novel I looked at this photograph constantly. It was taken in about 1857, the year my novel is set, and shows Dadd, aged about 40, in the hospital at his easel where the unfinished oval of Contradiction: Oberon and Titania sits, waiting for the brush he holds to bring it to life. He stares at the camera, at us, with recognition and warmth, looking more like an artist in his studio than a prisoner in his cell.

I’ve received some useful advice about republishing my own work from my friend Stephanie Williams ,who writes a Substack newsletter called My Adventures in Self-Publishing. After a long career as a journalist and conventionally published author she has just published a very interesting book, The Education of Girls: Coming of age in 4 years that changed America 1966-1970.

In this book Stephanie vividly describes her shock in 1970 when, as a student at Wellesley, she heard that National Guardsmen had shot 13 students at Kent State University. There is alarming resonance with events unfolding in Trump’s America now. My own adventures in self-publishing are just beginning.

The Women in Black will continue to hold a weekly vigil for Gaza outside Friends’ House on Euston Road each Saturday between 12 and 1. I will be joining them again, despite Trump’s declaration that the region is now “at peace” and hopefully will remain so “for eternity”. Thousands of orphans snd other survivors of two years of bombing and massacre are returning to the bulldozed rubble that was once their homes, using their bare hands to search in the ruined city for the remains of their loved ones. The politicians who destroyed Gaza and those who armed them are the first to congratulate themselves on this “new dawn.” As I write this there are ominous reports that the fragile peace has already been broken, and people are still dying in Gaza.

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Palestinians women in Gaza City, 12 October 2025. Photograph: Majdi Fathi/NurPhoto/ Shutterstock

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