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.

Narratives of Women’s Health and Hysteria in the Nineteenth-Century Novel looks extensively at hysteria discourse through medical and sociological texts and examines how this body of work intersects with important cultural debates to define women’s social, physical, and mental health. The book sketches out prominent shifts in cultural reactions to the idea of diffused agency and the prized model of the interiorized, individual person capable of self will and governance. Melissa Rampelli takes up the work of Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, George Eliot, and Thomas Hardy, showing how the authors play with and manipulate stock literary figures to contribute to this dialogue about the causes and cures of women’s hysterical distress.