A Georgian tragedy of madness and mystery: Louisa, the 'maid of the haystack'.

In 1777 a strange, distracted young woman took up residence under a haystack in a village outside Bristol, attracting much local attention. 'Louisa' gained wider celebrity after the writer Hannah More publicised her plight in the national press. She subsequently spent several years in a private madhouse and then the lunatic ward of Guy's Hospital, where she died in 1800. It was generally presumed that Louisa was of noble foreign birth and possibly the hapless victim of family intrigue or even sexual exploitation, her mysterious story being interpreted as a contemporary morality tale. In actuality, recorded circumstances demonstrated quite sympathetic communal responses toward victims of insanity, as well as different options for providing care and treatment in 18th-century England.