Nature's invalids: the medicalization of womanhood. The 'problem' of woman: interpretation and therapeutics -- Disappointment and decline: Shirley, Adela Cathcart, Deerbrook -- From passion to paralysis: hysterical pathology and Dickens's women -- Nervous sensibility and ideals of manliness. The disorder of literary men -- Hypersensitive heroes: The Professor and 'The Lifted Veil' -- The 'unmapped country': physiology, consciousness, and the mysteries of the inner life. Basil and fictions of delirium
The 'Mystic Boundary' between body and mind: George Eliot and G.H. Lewes -- 'Contrary tendencies': physiological psychology in Daniel Deronda -- New women and neurasthenia: nervous degeneration and the 1890s. 'Aberrant Passions, and Unaccountable Antipathies' -- Rebellion and recklessness in The Whirlpool of modern life -- Refinement and reversion in Jude the Obscure
Summary
In what was once described as The Century of Nerves, a fascination with the processes governing physical and psychological states was shared by medical and fiction writers alike. This is a study of pathology in Victorian fiction
