Women and Madness in the Early Romantic Novel: Injured Minds, Ruined Lives

Women and madness in the early Romantic novel returns madness to a central role in feminist literary criticism through an updated exploration of hysteria, melancholia, and love-madness in novels by Mary Wollstonecraft, Eliza Fenwick, Mary Hays, Maria Edgeworth, and Amelia Opie. This book argues that these early Romantic-period novelists revised medical and popular sentimental models for female madness that made inherent female weakness and the aberrant female body responsible for women’s mental afflictions. The book explores how the more radical authors -- Wollstonecraft, Fenwick and Hays -- blamed men and patriarchal structures of control for their characters’ hysteria and melancholia, while the more mainstream writers -- Edgeworth and Opie -- located causality in less gendered and less victimized accounts. Taken as a whole, the book makes a powerful case for focusing on women’s mental health in eighteenth- and nineteenth- century literary criticism.

Deborah Weiss is Associate Professor of English at the University of Alabama