A sentence of death had been passed on her: representing the experience of breast cancer in Britain through the long nineteenth century

Abstract

This project revises current histories of women's experience with breast cancer in nineteenth-century Britain, including assumptions that women remained silent about the disease. The interdisciplinary study relates medicine to three genres in the nineteenth century--medical nonfiction, personal nonfiction and life writing, and fiction--noting the ways those genres address and incorporate experiences with breast cancer. Though these three genres seem distinct, the dissertation argues for connections that bring them together through the genre category of the breast cancer narrative. The project recovers primary texts that relate to breast cancer in the period, some of which have been published with little (if any) discussion of the impact of breast cancer on the text. Many others, however, have remained unpublished and have been recovered from archives and libraries for the purposes of this project. The larger implications of this project include four key areas of significance.^First, I offer possibilities for a change in the way we discuss assumed silences in women's experience, with this study specifically expanding current knowledge about breast cancer in the nineteenth century to include voices and narratives that have been frequently overlooked. Second, this study proposes a method for reading the hidden narratives of breast cancer and for analyzing details beneath the surface texts of life writing. Additionally, though this project focuses on assumed silences specifically related to the experiences of breast cancer, it provides a model for reading other seemingly hidden narratives in print culture and recognizing alternative means of expression that have remained effaced and submerged. Finally, this project offers an interdisciplinary and transhistorical approach to women's experiences with breast cancer.^In order to fully analyze life writing, fiction, poetry, periodicals, medical texts, art, and more generally women's experiences with illness, the study adapts and develops models for making connections among the fields of literature, periodical studies, history of medicine, art history, gender studies, and disability studies. The project includes an introductory chapter followed by chapters on medical nonfiction, life writing by the patient, life writing by the patient's friends and family, and fiction--Abstract.