Narratives of Women’s Health and Hysteria in the Nineteenth-Century Novel

Melissa Rampelli is Associate Professor of English at Holy Family University, USA.

• Introduction.- 1. The Problem of the Self-Governed Subject in Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility.- 2. Embodied Knowing and the Hysteric in Dickens’s Bleak House.- 3. George Eliot’s Middlemarch and the Question of Marriage as Catalyst or Cure.- 4. Hysterical Degeneration and The New Woman in Thomas Hardy’s The Woodlanders.- Epilogue.