That strangest spectre, Hypochondria

Tormented Hope by Brian Dillon is an upcoming book which contains a study of Charlotte Brontë from a hypochondriac point of view:

Tormented Hope
Nine Hypochondriac Lives
Brian Dillon
Penguin Ireland
Hardback : 03 Sep 2009
Format : Hardback
ISBN: 9781844881345
Pages : 288

Tormented Hope is a book about mind and body, fear and hope, illness and imagination. It explores, in the stories of nine individuals, the relationship between mind and body as it is mediated by the experience, or simply the terror, of being ill. And in an intimate investigation of those nine lives, it shows how the mind can make a prison of the body, by distorting our sense of ourselves as physical beings. Brian Dillon, whose brilliant debut In the Dark Room established him as an uncommonly intelligent and fluent explorer of the realm where ideas and emotions overlap, looks at nine prominent hypochondriacs - James Boswell, Charlotte Brontë, Charles Darwin, Florence Nightingale, Daniel Paul Schreber, Alice James, Marcel Proust, Glenn Gould and Andy Warhol - and what their lives tell us about the way the mind works with, and against, the body. His findings are stimulating and surprising, and the stories he tells are often moving, sometimes hilarious, and always gripping.

The author himself presents the book in The Guardian and highlights Charlotte Brontë's own approach to hypochondria:

Victorian hypochondria seems to have been intimately connected to the need for creative reclusion, nowhere more so than in the lives and writings of certain notable female hypochondriacs. Charlotte Brontë, for example, claimed to have suffered her first hypochondriacal fit while teaching at Roe Head at 19. The illness, she wrote, "made life a continual waking nightmare". Brontë put her crisis down to the drudgery of teaching, which left her little time to write; she felt, she said, "the heavy gloom of many long hours". Readers of Jane Eyre may recall that on the night before they are meant to be married, Rochester dismisses Jane's fear as a "hypochondria" born of excitement and fatigue. But the fullest expression of Brontë's own malady comes in Villette, when the novel's narrator, Lucy Snowe, her privacy invaded and her covert desires exposed, succumbs to "that strangest spectre, Hypochondria".
Brontë seems to have meant by the word a debilitating perplex of panic and despair: something close to a "breakdown" in the modern sense.

Categories: Books, Charlotte Brontë