Brown died aged just 42 but very much in the manner in which she lived: capriciously, and in defiantly high spirits. After an emergency appendectomy in France, she gave a cancan kick to show a nurse how very fine she was feeling. It sent a blood clot travelling from her leg to her brain.

Eccentric or mad?

Children’s literature is bursting with examples of eccentric authors. Frances Hodgson Burnett longed for daughters and so dressed her sons in frills. Russell Hoban, whose early career encompassed the Frances books and that unsung masterpiece, The Mouse and His Child, worked in an extraordinary room dense with waist-high piles of books and curiosities like windup toys, that he dubbed his ‘exobrain’. You’d think it was home to a kleptomaniac shut-in if you didn’t know better. In her new biography of Edward Lear, Jenny Uglow observes that the heroically talented artist, versifier and traveller was, from boyhood, “three parts crazy”. But does that mean certifiably so? At what point does eccentricity become something more problematic?

Now that we have the vocabulary and sharper diagnostic tools, some authors have spoken out about their mental health battles. JK Rowling has opened up about her depression, and wrote the Dementors into being to illustrate how it feels to be a sufferer. Robert Munsch, author of the perennial bestseller Love You Forever, has been open about his struggles with bipolar disorder and addiction.