Convalescence in the Nineteenth-Century Novel
The Afterlife of Victorian Illness

This interdisciplinary study examines how holistic aftercare became a crucial supplement to scientific medicine in nineteenth-century Britain.

Hosanna Krienke (Author)

9781108948913, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 22 June 2023

246 pages
22.7 x 15.2 x 1.4 cm, 0.37 kg

'Krienke successfully delivers an interdisciplinary and theoretically ambitious study of “the afterlife of Victorian Illness” (in all senses of her subtitle). Thoroughly researched and accessibly written, [the book] illuminates the classed overtones of striving for health and the temporality of able-bodiedness, recovering a lost ethics of community care that has much to teach us in the twenty-first century.' Emilie Taylor-Pirie, Victorian Studies

Victorian Britain witnessed a resurgence of traditional convalescent caregiving. In the face of a hectic modern existence, nineteenth-century thinkers argued that all medical patients desperately required a lengthy, meandering period of recovery. Various reformers worked to extend the benefits of holistic recuperative care to seemingly unlikely groups: working-class hospital patients, insane asylum inmates, even low-ranking soldiers across the British Empire. Hosanna Krienke offers the first sustained scholarly assessment of nineteenth-century convalescent culture, revealing how interpersonal post-acute care was touted as a critical supplement to modern scientific medicine. As a method of caregiving intended to alleviate both physical and social ills, convalescence united patients of disparate social classes, disease categories, and degrees of impairment. Ultimately, this study demonstrates how novels from Bleak House to The Secret Garden draw on the unhurried timescale of convalescence as an ethical paradigm, training readers to value unfolding narratives apart from their ultimate resolutions.

1. Convalescence and the Working-Class: Convalescent Homes, Illness Outcomes, and Charles Dickens's Bleak House
2. Spiritual Convalescence: Reading Against the Deathbed in Convalescent Devotionals and Elizabeth Gaskell's Ruth
3. Novel-Reading as Convalescence: Gender and Leisure in Wilkie Collins's The Moonstone
4. Convalescence and Mental Illness: Recuperability in Insane Asylums, the After-Care Association, and Samuel Butler's Erewhon
5. Imperial Convalescence: Frances Hodgson Burnett's The Secret Garden, Convalescent Depots, and the Birth of Rehabilitation Medicine.

Subject Areas: Literary studies: fiction, novelists & prose writers [DSK], Literary studies: c 1800 to c 1900 [DSBF], Literature: history & criticism [DS], Literature & literary studies [D]