Edinburgh University Press Medicine and Women’s Fiction: Hysteria, Bodies and Narratives, 1850s to 1930s (Gender and the Body in Literature and Culture)

Surveys women writers’ engagements with hysteria in Victorian and modernist literature Belongs to a new wave in interdisciplinary literary criticism which aims to take seriously the materiality of the body in forming readings of texts, making use of contemporaneous ideas inspired by medicine and physiology Brings literature and medicine together through a balance of detailed close reading and historical context, and points to a shared language: the prevalence of medical and scientific ideas in popular culture and their reworking in fiction Part of a recovery and rediscovery of lost and little-known works of female authors: Rhoda Broughton’s Nancy (1873) and short supernatural stories; Lucas Malet (Mary St Leger Harrison)’s Wages of Sin (1891) and The Survivors (1923); and Djuna Barnes’s Ryder (1928) Brings new attention to women writers’ engagement with medicine and the adoption of the role of medical authority, building on and challenging established readings of the role of medicine in, for example, Charlotte Brontë’s Villette (1853); Sarah Grand’s The Heavenly Twins (1893) and The Beth Book (1897); and Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood (1936) Troubles accepted truths about narratives of the female body in both fiction and medicine, tracking hysteria’s development and gendering as both a pathology and a metaphor This book looks afresh at the history of hysteria to nuance and complicate existing understandings of the relationship between medicine and women’s writing. Through in-depth analyses of both medical texts and women’s fiction published between the 1850s and 1930s, it documents the prevalence of scientific ideas in popular culture and how hysterical symptomatology has been appropriated, reworked and satirised in literature. Examining novels and short stories by Charlotte Brontë, Rhoda Broughton, Sarah Grand, Lucas Malet and Djuna Barnes, Medicine and Women’s Fiction traces women writers’ fascination with the materiality and instability of the body, troubling inherited truths about mental health and gender in literary and medical discourse. In contrast to stereotypical images of hysteria, it draws particular attention to disorder as part of everyday experience: the familiar, mundane ways in which the body goes out of control, from involuntary movements to ghostly hallucinations and unruly organs. Altogether, Louise Benson James re-evaluates what it means to take hysteria seriously in fiction.