The Sickroom in Charlotte Brontë

This month Cambridge University Press publishes in paperback 'The Sickroom in Victorian Fiction', originally published in 1994 in hardback:

The Sickroom in Victorian Fiction
The Art of Being Ill
Series: Cambridge Studies in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture (No. 1)
Miriam Bailin
Paperback
ISBN-13: 9780521036405

* There was also a Hardback of this title but it is no longer available
* Published May 2007

In this exploration of the significance of illness in the Victorian literary imagination Miriam Bailin maps the cultural implications and narrative effects of the sickroom as an important symbolic space in nineteenth-century life and literature. Dr Bailin draws on non-fictional accounts of illness by Julia Stephen, Harriet Martineau and others to illuminate the presentation of illness and ministration, patient and nurse, in the fiction of Charlotte Brontë, Charles Dickens and George Eliot. She argues that the sickroom functions as an imagined retreat from conflicts in Victorian society, and that fictional representations of illness serve to resolve both social conflict and aesthetic tension. Her concentration on the sickroom scene as a compositional response to insistent formal as well as social problems yields fresh readings of canonical works and approaches to the constituent elements of Victorian realist narrative.

Chapter 2 is devoted to Charlotte Brontë:

2. Charlotte Brontë: 'varieties of pain'.

Categories: Books, Charlotte Brontë, Scholar