Jane Austen and the Body

Jane Austen has been thought of as a novelist of manners whose work discreetly avoids discussing the physical. John Wiltshire shows on the contrary how important are bodies and faces illness and health in the novels from complainers and invalids such as Mrs. Bennet and Mr. Woodhouse to the frail debilitated Fanny Price the vulnerable Jane Fairfax and the picture of health Emma. The book draws on modern theories of the body and on eighteenth-century medical sources to give a fresh and controversial reading of familiar texts.