The sickroom in Victorian fiction : the art of being ill / Miriam Bailin.

Title from publisher's bibliographic system (viewed on 05 Oct 2015).

Life in the sickroom -- Charlotte Brontë: "varieties of pain" -- Charles Dickens: "impossible existences" -- Geroge Eliot: "separateness and communication" -- Afterword.

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.