• Women and madness in the early Romantic novel
1 1

Women and madness in the early Romantic novel

£25.00
£25.00 £25.00
Sale Sold out
This book argues that early Romantic-Period women novelists used female madness to critique patriarchal structures of control and to revise misogynistic medical and popular sentimental models that ...
Read More
  • Format:
  • 23 June 2026
View Product Details
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.
files/i.png Icon
Price: £25.00
Pages: 248
Publisher: Manchester University Press
Imprint: Manchester University Press
Publication Date: 23 June 2026
ISBN: 9781526198259
Format: Paperback
BISACs:

LITERARY CRITICISM / Modern / 19th Century, Literary studies: c 1800 to c 1900, LITERARY CRITICISM / Subjects & Themes / Women, LITERARY CRITICISM / Feminist, Literary studies: fiction, novelists and prose writers, Literature: history and criticism, Literary studies: postcolonial literature
REVIEWS Icon

‘On the journey from Sterne’s roadside ‘Mad Maria’ to Brontë’s ‘Madwoman in the Attic,’ Weiss has found not only other vivid female characters reduced by patriarchy to mania or melancholy but also the makings of a dark sequel to her excellent book on the figure of the female philosopher. ‘
—James Chandler, The University of Chicago

‘Thorough in its research, measured and persuasive in its arguments, wide-reaching in its implications, and very well-written, Weiss's splendid book shows how five exemplary novelists used the resources of narrative fiction to upend patriarchal discourses regarding women and mental health.’
—Stephen Arata, The University of Virginia

Introduction: Women and madness in the early-Romantic novel
1 Madness and Maria: The Wrongs of Woman and patriarchal control
2 Of Madness and monitors: Secresy; or, the Ruin on the Rock
3 Death by despair: Fatal melancholia in The Victim of Prejudice
4 Misplaced passions, erroneous associations and remorse: Madness reconsidered in Belinda
5 The impossibility of love-madness: The Father and Daughter
Coda: Wide Sargasso Sea: The erasure of love-madness and the mad woman’s revenge
Bibliography
Index