For about twenty years now, feminist criticism has been mad about a nineteenth-century madwoman. Straitjacketed by convention and, occasionally, by more material restraints, the madwoman has been an enormously compelling image of both thwarted feminine potential -- whether artistic or sexual -- and distorted political expression, her symptoms seeming to issue a sickly critique of the society that oppresses her. Able simultaneously to cathect fantasies of resistance and fears of recuperation (to the extent that hysteria was a form of rebellion, it was not a very effective one), the madwoman has been strikingly useful to feminism as a means of theorizing the problems and possibilities of our own political moment. Concentrating on a specific form of hysteria -- love-madness -- Helen Small puts the recent craze for madwomen in historical and theoretical perspective, complicating our tendency to use the madwoman to tell feminist stories by looking at what stories she was used to tell during her own lifetime. What Small finds is a history of infinite allusional regress, a madwoman who was never not somebody else's story, who was always already a stylized body of words. Tracking the love-mad woman across a range of literary and medical texts between 1800 and 1865, Love's Madness anatomizes a convention, analyzing how the ancient story of the woman driven mad by her lover's treachery became a staple figure in the narrative productions of an emergent modernity.

Much of the work on nineteenth-century hysteria has been -- like the madwoman herself -- bound by disciplinary constraints. Studies have tended to be either mainly historical, concerned with the material conditions of "real" madness, or primarily literary, focusing on the poetics of madness. There have been few sustained efforts to integrate these two lines of thought, and as a result the vast body of work devoted to the madwoman has tended to seem a bit hysterical in its own right, to have a personality split sharply down disciplinary lines. Love's Madness breaks out of the pattern by treating literature and medicine as two equally important, generically apposite strands of a single history. The years between 1800 and 1865 were formative for both psychiatry and fiction: 1800 marked the decline of sentimentalism and the advent of medical reform in the treatment of the mad; 1865 saw the establishment of the Medico-Psychological Association at the height of sensation fiction's popularity. According to Small, this period also brackets the lifespan of the love-mad woman -- not as a clinical fact, but as a narrative entity. Formerly at home in poetry and drama, the love-mad woman moved into narrative during these years, appearing regularly in both novels and medical case studies. There she unfolded a plot of romantic desertion and mental decline that enabled doctors and novelists to articulate ideas about everything from gender to politics to professionalism to the nature of narrative itself. According to Small, the love-mad woman's ideological power lay precisely in her limited capacity for movement, her ability to evoke the same old story of love, loss, and ruin over and over again. Able to compress a range of meanings into a single narrative trajectory, her instrumentality lay in the sheer predictability of her story, which obliged doctors and novelists to confront the literariness of even their most straightforward efforts at representation, and ultimately pushed them to generate new strategies of literary and clinical realism.

Broadly chronological, the chapters develop a densely textured analysis of how a narrow, increasingly inflexible trope was bent in the service of a range of medical, social, and aesthetic issues during the first half of the nineteenth century. An expansive theoretical and historical Introduction is followed by a chapter on how early- to mid-nineteenth-century psychiatry employed love-mad women to consolidate itself professionally. The third chapter reads the hyperbolic language surrounding love-madness in Jane Austen's Sense and Sensibility (1811) and the Della Cruscan novelist Charlotte Dacre against the backdrop of George III's legendary insanity, arguing that overdrawn accounts of women's madness in Dacre and Austen expressed emergent frustration at the inadequacy of language to capture feeling. Chapter Four tracks the affective emptying of love-madness through Regency fiction, charting how the love-mad woman became an extremely useful vessel for stories about political insurrection. The final two chapters chronicle the incarceration and slow death of the love-mad woman over the early years of the Victorian period. Reading Jane Eyre (1847) as a conscious rejection of the madwoman as a center of meaning, Chapter Five analyzes how Charlotte Bronte's perception of emotional instability as a threat to textual stability led her to lock the love-mad woman away in order to develop a more disciplined aesthetic of psychological realism. The final chapter opens with an extended discussion of the parallels between Bronte's story of botched marriage and the real-life struggles of Edward Bulwer Lytton and William Makepeace Thackeray to control their mad wives, and ends at the death-beds of Miss Havisham and Anne Catherick (a.k.a. the Woman in White), arguably the two most famous literary love-mad women of the 1860s. Old and outdated, the love-mad woman was laid to rest during the sixties as doctors replaced her conventional contours with gynecological theories of madness and authors shaped new models of mental distress.

By taking an interdisciplinary approach to a literary convention, Love's Madness constitutes not only a revisionary history of nineteenth-century figurations of female madness, but also raises questions about how madwomen figure in contemporary feminism. Small's careful analysis of how the love-mad woman both articulated and resolved various problems of professional expression during her own lifetime resonates powerfully with how the hysteric has functioned during feminism's coming of age, enabling critics of all methodological dispositions to speak about the relations among writing and experience, feeling and politics, mind and body, power and resistance. Small is at her best when she addresses aspects of this continuity -- her reading of Jane Eyre is especially striking for its combination of historical and theoretical critique. These exciting moments tend to remain just that, however: moments. Although the Introduction sets up a critique of feminist approaches to madwomen that does get carried through each chapter, there is no final moment of synthesis -- something a book this rich and provocative sorely needs. In the end, the reader is left, like the love-mad woman herself, feeling a bit bereft, and wishing very hard for more.