The Foundling

December 1, 2021

In 1927, 18-year-old Mary Engle is glad to get a job as secretary at the disturbingly named Nettleton State Village for Feebleminded Women of Childbearing Age, run by charismatic Dr. Agnes Vogel. Then she encounters a patient named Lillian, who was raised in the same orphanage as Mary and asks her help in escaping; Nettleton, she claims, is not as benevolent as it seems. From theNew York Times best-selling Leary (The Good House); with a 100,000-copy first printing.

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March 21, 2022
Leary’s gripping latest (after The Children) chronicles a naïve young woman’s role in a eugenics program at a Pennsylvania asylum in 1927. Mary Engle grows up in an orphanage and, at 18, gets her first job as secretary to Agnes Vogel, head of the Nettleton State Village for Feebleminded Women of Childbearing Age, where women are imprisoned for reasons including prostitution, same sex or biracial relationships, drinking, or having children while unwed. These “unfit” women are forced to perform unpaid farm labor until they are past childbearing age, at which point they are released. Mary is in awe of the accomplished Vogel until she recognizes new inmate Lillian, who was a close friend at the orphanage and was sent to Nettleton for having a child out of wedlock with a Black musician. Lillian begs Mary to help get her out, but Mary initially remains loyal to Vogel. Meanwhile, Mary falls in love with a journalist who tells her that Vogel and the institution are corrupt. As she learns about Vogel’s cover-ups of black market liquor dealings and the sexual assault on an inmate, she realizes neither Vogel nor Nettleton are what they claim to be. Leary makes an engrossing drama out of Mary’s shifting allegiance, and this ends with an impressive twist. Readers will rip through this tale of historical injustice. Agent: Dorian Karchmar, WME.

March 15, 2022
One of the cardinal rules of the Nettleton State Village for Feebleminded Women of Childbearing Age is that staff and inmates must never fraternize. To even acknowledge each other could cause the employee to be fired and the inmate to be incarcerated in the asylum's most punitive housing. So Mary Engle's shock at seeing Lillian, her childhood friend from their mutual time at a local orphanage, as one of the patients assigned to the onerous dairy crew is enough to raise conflicting emotions. Mary needs her prestigious job as secretary to Dr. Agnes Vogel, the psychiatrist and eugenics proponent who runs the facility. But she also knows that Lillian is not intellectually or morally deficient, as Vogel claims. When Lillian asks Mary to help free her from Nettleton so that she can reunite her with her child and lover, Mary puts herself and others at great risk. Leary's (The Children, 2016) richly rendered, tender tale of friendship and loyalty, based on her own family history, brings into sharp focus the horrors of such punitive institutions, which proliferated in early-twentieth-century America.

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Starred review from March 15, 2022
Leary turns her mordant eye to the interplay of feminism, racism, and eugenics at a state institution for women deemed unfit to bear children in 1927. The fictional Nettleton State Village for Feebleminded Women of Child Bearing Age is based on actual asylums where women deemed to have "moral feeblemindedness"--often because they defied social norms or their husbands--were involuntarily placed. Narrator Mary Engle comes to work as a secretary at the supposedly benevolent Nettleton when she's not quite 18. Having lived in an orphanage until she was 12, Mary feels at home in the institutional setting, and she's also deeply impressed with Nettleton's superintendent, Dr. Agnes Vogel, a woman who's both a respected doctor--rare at the time--and a suffragette. Then Mary recognizes Lillian Faust, one of the inmates, as a slightly older girl she'd known at the orphanage; Lillian claims she doesn't belong at Nettleton, saying her abusive husband stuck her there because she'd had a baby with her Black lover. Mary feels conflicted, her instinct to help Lillian escape at odds with her loyalty to Dr. Vogel. Mary is also having a romance with a muckraking Jewish journalist she doesn't fully trust. Leary's spot-on descriptions of small moments (learning the Charleston, drinking bootleg liquor) bring the Prohibition era to life. The murky politics and ethics of the time, hinting of parallels with today, are embodied in Dr. Vogel--a feminist committed to expanding women's rights but also an ardent promoter of eugenics and populist fears (of Blacks, Jews, and Catholics, among others) and a despot who cares little about the Nettleton inmates' welfare. But the novel's heart centers on Mary's moral coming-of-age. Not as na�ve as she'd have others believe and possessing a strong survival instinct, Mary clings defensively to her belief in Dr. Vogel despite damning evidence because doing so suits her ambitions. The reluctance with which Mary changes makes her eventual act of courage--against social conventions and despite the personal cost--all the more satisfying. Leary's wit complements her serious approach to historical and psychological issues in this thoroughly satisfying novel.

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