They said she was mad' : insanity in the fiction of Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu

Abstract

This thesis contextualises the work of Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu in nineteenth-century debates on insanity. Le Fanu lived at a time when psychiatry was establishing itself as a new branch of medicine, and its advances, together with the scandals related to medical corruption, became topical subjects of discussion in the popular press and in fiction. Le Fanu’s knowledge of and interest in insanity were not primarily derived from his involvement in periodical and newspaper culture. He had direct experience of nervous instability in his very household, through contact with his afflicted wife and cousin.