The mad woman's revenge

A recent scholarly book with some Brontë-related content:

Women and madness in the early Romantic novel

Injured minds, ruined lives

by Deborah Weiss

Manchester University Press

ISBN: 9781526175717

November 2024

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.       

The book has a coda:Wide Sargasso Sea: The erasure of love-madness and the mad woman's revenge