num_pages: 220
description: Anna Silver examines the ways nineteenth-century British writers used physical states of the female body--hunger appetite fat and slenderness--in the creation of female characters. She argues that anorexia nervosa first diagnosed in 1873 serves as a paradigm for the cultural ideal of middle-class womanhood in Victorian Britain. Silver uses the works of a wide range of writers (including Charlotte Bronte Christina Rossetti Charles Dickens Bram Stoker and Lewis Carroll) to demonstrate that mainstream models of middle-class Victorian womanhood share important qualities with the beliefs or behaviors of the anorexic female.
language: English
title: Victorian Literature and the Anorexic Body
publisher: Cambridge University Press