Accessibility statement

"But what shall we do with a doctor here?": The Ridiculous Invalid at the Seaside in the Novels of Jane Austen

Tuesday 11 February 2025, 4.00PM

Speaker(s): Emma Butler, Edge Hill University

To celebrate 250 years since the birth of Jane Austen, we are delighted to announce that Emma Butler, PhD student at Edge Hill University, will be joining us to deliver her paper: "But what shall we do with a doctor here?": The Ridiculous Invalid at the Seaside in the Novels of Jane Austen

Abstract: Jane Austen set her final novel Sanditon (started in 1817 and left unfinished after Austen’s death in the same year) at the seaside – a place ‘designed by nature for the resort of the invalid’. As Austen’s only fully ‘seaside’ novel, Sanditon represents the appetite in the 18th and 19th centuries for the water cure. The seaside resort as a setting in long 18th-century fiction became a place that opened up representation of health, illness, and the ‘invalid’ figure within literature. Using Sanditon and Persuasion (1817), the session will demonstrate how historical perspectives of disability and hypochondria enable readings of the invalid character at the (fictional) seaside. Lyme Regis and Austen’s fictional resort ‘Sanditon’ both act as settings where characters heal from illness, become ill, and seek treatment for chronic (and/or imagined) illness.

Despite being heavily satirised, the invalid character trope allows for contemporary discussion about the gendering of the invalid, the reputation of the ill and disabled in literature and culture, and debates around the validity of illness and the perception of pain and sickness during the long eighteenth century. Emma will apply Susan Sontag’s seminal publication, Illness as Metaphor (1978) to Austen’s depiction of the seaside resort in relation to the cultural idea of health and the ‘invalid’ of the period. The session will also demonstrate how the seaside can be figured as a liminal space within the literary imagination, and how the invalid character can be read as ‘ridiculous’.

About the speaker: Emma is a current PhD researcher in English Literature at Edge Hill University. Her thesis, ‘From Health to Leisure: The Seaside Resort in the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination’, studies the representation of the coast as a liminal space in nineteenth-century literature. Emma holds a BA (Hons) in English and an MA in Nineteenth-Century Studies from Edge Hill University and is an interdisciplinary scholar of literature and history. Emma’s research interests span the long nineteenth century, with a specific focus on the novels of Jane Austen, Gothic studies, and health humanities.

To register your attendance, please email cecs-pgforum@york.ac.uk

This event has been organised by the CECS PG Forum.

Location: Online