Women and madness in the early Romantic novel returns madness to a central role in feminist literary criticism through an updated exploration of hysteria, melancholia, and love-madness in novels by Mary Wollstonecraft, Eliza Fenwick, Mary Hays, Maria Edgeworth, and Amelia Opie.
This book argues that these early Romantic-period novelists revised medical and popular sentimental models for female madness that made inherent female weakness and the aberrant female body responsible for women's mental afflictions. The book explores how the more radical authors
Wollstonecraft, Fenwick and Hays
blamed men and patriarchal structures of control for their characters' hysteria and melancholia, while the more mainstream writers
Edgeworth and Opie
located causality in less gendered and less victimised accounts. Taken as a whole, the book makes a powerful case for focusing on women's mental health in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century literary criticism.
By:
Deborah Weiss
Imprint: Manchester University Press
Country of Publication: United Kingdom
Dimensions:
Height: 234mm,
Width: 156mm,
Spine: 16mm
Weight: 527g
ISBN: 9781526175717
ISBN 10: 1526175711
Pages: 248
Publication Date: 19 November 2024
Audience:
General/trade
,
ELT Advanced
Format: Hardback
Publisher's Status: Active
Introduction: Women and madness in the early-Romantic novel 1 Madness and Maria: The Wrongs of Woman and patriarchal control 2 Of Madness and monitors: Secresy; or, the Ruin on the Rock 3 Death by despair: Fatal melancholia in The Victim of Prejudice 4 Misplaced passions, erroneous associations and remorse: Madness reconsidered in Belinda 5 The impossibility of love-madness: The Father and Daughter Coda: Wide Sargasso Sea: The erasure of love-madness and the mad woman’s revenge Bibliography Index -- .
Deborah Weiss is Associate Professor of English at the University of Alabama.
