Overview

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 Bronte, 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.

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9781399523080

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Reviews

Louise Benson James offers a deeply researched survey of ‘hysteria’ in the period’s fiction and medical history. Focusing on women authors, Benson James shows how they knew and claimed the science around hysteria – even while using it critically. Her nuanced reading of male medical practitioners also recaptures their complexity as healers. -- Pamela Gilbert, University of Florida

Louise Benson James offers a deeply researched survey of hysteria in the period’s fiction and medical history. Focusing on women authors, Benson James shows how they knew and claimed the science around hysteria – even while using it critically. Her nuanced reading of male medical practitioners also recaptures their complexity as healers. -- Pamela Gilbert, University of Florida

Author Information

Louise Benson James is a Postdoctoral Fellow in English Literature at Ghent University, Belgium. After completing her PhD at the University of Bristol in 2020, she was awarded a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Postdoctoral Fellowship, followed by a Research Foundation Flanders (FWO) Senior Postdoctoral Fellowship. Her research focuses on literature, culture and medicine in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, particularly representations of hysteria, nervous disorder, internal organs and the digestive system in women’s fiction, popular fiction and periodicals.

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