Love's Madness: Medicine, the Novel, and Female Insanity, 1800-1865Stories about women who go mad when they lose their lovers were extraordinarily popular during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, attracting novelists, poets, dramatists, musicians, painters, and sculptors. The representative figure of madness ceased to be the madman in chains and became instead the woman whose insanity was an extension of her female condition. Love's Madness traces the fortunes of love-mad women in fiction and in medicine between about 1800 and 1865. In literary terms, these dates demarcate the period between the decline of sentimentalism and the emergence of sensation fiction. In medical terms, they mark out a key stage in the history of insanity, beginning with major reform initiatives and ending with the establishment in 1865 of the Medico-Psychological Association. |
Contents
List of Illustrations XIII | 11 |
LoveMad Women and the Rhetoric of Gentlemanly | 33 |
George III | 72 |
LoveMad Women and Political Insurrection in Regency | 105 |
Lucretia and Jane Eyre | 139 |
The Woman in White Great Expectations and | 179 |
| 221 | |
| 249 | |
Other editions - View all
Love's Madness: Medicine, the Novel, and Female Insanity, 1800-1865 Helen Small No preview available - 1996 |
Common terms and phrases
asylum become Bertha Mason Bride of Lammermoor Bulwer-Lytton century Charlotte Brontë Charlotte Dacre claim Collins Conolly Conolly's Cox's critical culture Dacre's Dashwood death derangement Dickens disease doctor eighteenth Elaine Showalter Elinor England English eyes feeling female insanity Female Malady feminine Feminist fiction Fletcher George Glenarvon Hartright's heart Henry Maudsley History of Madness History of Psychiatry hyperbole hysteria hysteric Jane Austen Jane Eyre Jane's John John Conolly Lady language Laura letter literary literature London love-mad woman love-madness convention lover Lucretia Lucy Lunacy Lytton madwoman Marianne Mary Maturin Maudsley Maudsley's medicine mental Milesian Chief mind Miss Havisham moral Morison narrative nervous nineteenth nineteenth-century novel Ophelia Oxford passion patient physician Pip's political psychological Ravenswood reader reading representation revenge Revolution Rhetoric Rochester romantic Rosina Sarah Fletcher's scene Science Sense and Sensibility sensibility sentimental sexual Showalter social society story Thackeray tion Victorian Wilkie Collins Woman in White women writing