Self-Harm in New Woman Writing

Traces Victorian self-harm through an engagement with literary fiction
Self-Harm in New Woman Writing offers a trans-disciplinary study of Victorian literature, culture and medicine through engagement with the recurrent trope of self-harm in writing by and about the British New Woman. Focusing on self-starvation, excessive drinking and self-mutilation, this study explores narratives of female resistance to Victorian patriarchy embedded in the work of both canonical and largely unknown women writers of the 1880s and 1890s, including Mary Angela Dickens and Victoria Cross. The book argues that the conditions of modernity now associated with self-harm in twentieth-century psychiatry (but beginning at the Fin de Siècle) provided the socio-cultural backdrop for a surge of interest in self-harm as a site of imaginative exploration at a time when women’s role in society was rapidly changing.
Key Features
Highly interdisciplinary, combining medical history, archival and periodical research, art history, gender studies and literary studiesRe-assessment of well-known New Woman authors as well as original research into newly discovered New Woman authorsFirst book-length examination of self-harm in Victorian literary fictionFirst study to suggest that Victorian self-harm (broadly speaking) can be traced through an engagement with literary fiction long before its emergence as a clinical category of behavior in the twentieth centuryReappraisal of New Woman studies suggesting some of the ways very different types of New Woman writing converged around a single thematic concern, and attempts to account for this in socio-historic (and formal) termsDetailed discussion of the work of Mary Angela Dickens and Victoria Cross, two comparatively unknown authors (almost no scholarly work currently exists on Dickens’s writing)