Women and Madness

"In an innovative contribution to a crucial debate, Dana Becker turns a compassionate eye toward those women oft maligned in traditional theory & clinical practice. Her cogent analysis ... recasts responses to the limits placed upon girls & women in a culture of gender inequality." Rachel T. Hare-Mustin Author of Making a Difference "With precision & deliberation, leaving no stone unturned, Dana Becker lays out the history of BPD & the sordid history of the psychiatric profession's diagnosing of women." Sharon Lamb Author of The Trouble with Blame

Love's Madness is an important new contribution to the interdisciplinary study of insanity. Focusing on the figure of the love-mad woman, it presents a significant reassessment of the ways in which British medical writers and novelists of the nineteenth century thought about madness, femininity, and narrative convention. The book centers around studies of novels by Jane Austen, Sir Walter Scott, Charlotte Bronte, Wilkie Collins, and Charles Dickens, as well as of previously neglected writings by Charles Maturin, Lady Caroline Lamb, and Edward Bulwer-Lytton, among others.