The Sickroom in Victorian Fiction
The Art of Being Ill

The cultural and narrative significance of illness, nursing and the sickroom in Victorian literature.

Miriam Bailin (Author)

9780521036405, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 14 May 2007

180 pages
22.8 x 15.3 x 0.5 cm, 0.279 kg

In this exploration of the significance of illness in the Victorian literary imagination Miriam Bailin maps the cultural implications and narrative effects of the sickroom as an important symbolic space in nineteenth-century life and literature. Dr Bailin draws on non-fictional accounts of illness by Julia Stephen, Harriet Martineau and others to illuminate the presentation of illness and ministration, patient and nurse, in the fiction of Charlotte Brontë, Charles Dickens and George Eliot. She argues that the sickroom functions as an imagined retreat from conflicts in Victorian society, and that fictional representations of illness serve to resolve both social conflict and aesthetic tension. Her concentration on the sickroom scene as a compositional response to insistent formal as well as social problems yields fresh readings of canonical works and approaches to the constituent elements of Victorian realist narrative.

Acknowledgements
A note on texts
Introduction
1. Life in the sickroom
2. Charlotte Brontë: 'varieties of pain'
3. Charles Dickens: 'impossible existences'
4. George Eliot: 'separateness and communication'
5. Afterword
Notes
Bibliography
Index.

Subject Areas: Literary studies: general [DSB]