Love's Madness - Medicine, the Novel, and Female Insanity, 1800-1865 (Paperback, Revised)

Love's Madness has made an important contribution to the interdisciplinary study of insanity. Focusing on the figure of the love-mad woman, it presents a significant reassessment of the ways in which British medical writers and novelists of the nineteenth century thought about madness, femininity, and narrative convention. At the centre of the book are studies of novels by Jane Austen, Sir Walter Scott, Charlotte Brönte, Wilkie Collins, and Charles Dickens, as well as of hitherto neglected writings by Charles Maturin, Lady Caroline Lamb, Edward Bulwer-Lytton, and others.