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.

Louise Benson James offers a deeply researched survey of hysteria in the period’s fiction and medical history. Focusing on women authors, Benson James shows how they knew and claimed the science around hysteria – even while using it critically. Her nuanced reading of male medical practitioners also recaptures their complexity as healers.

• Series PrefaceAcknowledgementsIntroduction: Treating the Hysterical Body1. Nervous Narratives: Charlotte Brontë, Villette (1853) and Mid-century Medical Men2. Unruly Bodies: Rhoda Broughton’s Nancy (1873) and Short Supernatural Fiction3. Mental Monstrosities, Medical Women and Material Culture: Sarah Grand’s The Heavenly Twins (1893) and The Beth Book (1897)4. Sexual Neuroses and Male Nerves: Lucas Malet’s Wages of Sin (1891) and The Survivors (1923)5. Medical Mythmaking, Modern Science and the Taboo: Djuna Barnes’s Ryder (1928) and Nightwood (1936)Conclusion: ‘How Shall I Keep Well?’BibliographyIndex

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.

Louise Benson James offers a deeply researched survey of hysteria in the period’s fiction and medical history. Focusing on women authors, Benson James shows how they knew and claimed the science around hysteria – even while using it critically. Her nuanced reading of male medical practitioners also recaptures their complexity as healers.

• Series PrefaceAcknowledgementsIntroduction: Treating the Hysterical Body1. Nervous Narratives: Charlotte Brontë, Villette (1853) and Mid-century Medical Men2. Unruly Bodies: Rhoda Broughton’s Nancy (1873) and Short Supernatural Fiction3. Mental Monstrosities, Medical Women and Material Culture: Sarah Grand’s The Heavenly Twins (1893) and The Beth Book (1897)4. Sexual Neuroses and Male Nerves: Lucas Malet’s Wages of Sin (1891) and The Survivors (1923)5. Medical Mythmaking, Modern Science and the Taboo: Djuna Barnes’s Ryder (1928) and Nightwood (1936)Conclusion: ‘How Shall I Keep Well?’BibliographyIndex