Medicine and Women's Fiction: Hysteria, Bodies and Narratives, 1850s to 1930s

by Louise Benson James

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 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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781399523080
Publisher:	Edinburgh University Press
Publication date:	04/30/2026
Series:	Gender and the Body in Literature and Culture
Pages:	240
Product dimensions:	6.14(w) x 9.21(h) x 0.00(d)

About the Author

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.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements

Introduction: Treating the Hysterical Body
1. Nervous Narratives: Charlotte Bronte, Villette (1853) and Mid-Century Medical Men
2. The Unruly Body in the Fiction of Rhoda Broughton (1840-1920)
3. Medical Women, Mental Monstrosities and Material Culture in Sarah Grand’s The Heavenly Twins (1893) and The Beth Book (1897)
4. ‘The Mystery, the Glory, the Cruel Riddle and Tragedy of Sex’: Nervous Bodies in the Fiction of Lucas Malet
5. Medical Mythmaking, Modern Science and the Taboo: Djuna Barnes’s Ryder (1928) and Nightwood (1936)
Conclusion: ‘How Shall I Keep Well?’

Bibliography