With love, Alice x

Letter 0ne

Dear Elsie,

My friend you have been kind to me beyond words can describe. I am sure by now you have heard a thousand versions of the mad girls tale, but non of the those versions are the truth. I will tell you everything you need to know about my life, but first you must understand the characters that are entailed in the mad girls tale.

My name is Alice, a lot of people call me Ally, I was born in the hot summer of 1912, which makes me 31. I married very young and had children very young.

My family included a father who spent most of his days doing sports he was a well off athlete, back in 1912 thousands of people would admire him obviously I was too young to understand his fame.

My mother stayed at home to look after us, although she didn't even need to do that, we were one of the most wealthy families living in Louisiana and we had a butler and maids that would wait on us. My mother was beautiful, extremely beautiful and people say she represented an angel of kinds because no body had seen such golden hair before, until I came along.

I was the youngest daughter of the family I had one elder sister who took after my father rather than our mother, like I did. Her hair was much darker than mine, a really dark blonde, the colour of the pages of a book left too long in the sun.

Annie was amazing and took the roll of caring for me when our mother died and our father went to fight in the great war. She was four nearly five years older than me and took to caring well, she has always done.

Our mother died in 1918 I was just five years old, Annie was soon to be ten, our maids looked after us for two months before our father came back from war.

He was distraught hearing the news about our mother. We did not see him for a few days, the maid told me and Annie that he was in his room crying. Annie told me that she went to his room and he wasn't there. My father did return eventually and he did look like he had been crying.

It wasn't too long after when I met Jack. I was seven and he would be ten soon.

My husband, Jack, were childhood sweet hearts he was a friend of the families and we had grown up together. My father and his parents, approved of our friendship and love so much that my father asked him whether or not he was going to ask me to marry him. On my 17th birthday in 1929 Jack asked me to marry him.

Within a year we were married and expecting our first child, a boy who came 11 months after our wedding day. I was turning 19 soon and Jack would be 22. We were very young parents, but where we grew up it was expected to marry young and have many children, especially if you have a lot of money like we did.

You could say my background is pretty much perfect, we were all very happy and there was a lot of love my life was good. I was happy. My life was perfect.

Elsie, I hope you understand that you need to know the background to my life to understand, why all this terrible stuff happened to me.

I hope I hear from you, what else am I meant to do in this institute for the insane?

With love, Alice X

That was the first letter off Alice I received. I enjoyed reading it and she always signed it with love Alice and she put a perfect X at the end. I admired Alice so much and I barely knew her. There was just something so precious and delicate about her.