LIT LISTS: Five books that trace the portrayal of mental disorders in literature

While working full time as a physician, Jane Shemilt received an M.A. in creative writing. She was shortlisted for the Janklow and Nesbit

award and the Lucy Cavendish Fiction Prize for The Daughter, her first novel. She and her husband, a professor of neurosurgery, have five children and live in Bristol, England.

Shemilt's new novel is The Patient.

At CrimeReads the author tagged five books that

reflect the age in which they were written; if mental illness is diagnosed by doctors it is also defined by society because society decides what makes behaviour unusual, undesirable or even ‘mad.’

One title on the list:

Jane Eyre, by Charlotte Bronte published in 1848

The story, set in the Victorian era, concerns Jane Eyre, an orphan sent by relatives to live in an orphanage which she leaves as a young woman when she finds employment as a governess to the ward of the Mr Rochester at Thornfield Hall, a place of mystery that appears haunted. Against this ghostly drop back, Jane and Edward Rochester fall in love but on the point of marriage to Mr Rochester, he is is revealed to have a mad wife, Bertha living under lock and key at Thornfield Hall. Jane leaves, returning at the end of the story to find Mr Rochester alone and blinded after a vain attempt to save Bertha as she was in the act of burning down the hall. The two marry.

Madness as embodied in the form of Bertha, the first wife, contributes narratively crucial elements of gothic suspense and intrigue; the reader is made aware, as Jane is, of laughter and footsteps in Thornfield, culminating in danger and horror. This gives the story its power and is key to the narrative arc, being the reason for the mystery and why Jane cannot marry and has to escape.

However, there are unsettling elements to this enduring story: the mad woman is described as animal-like, with wild hair and disheveled appearance, locked in a windowless room. To modern sensibilities this is a sensationalist and stereotypical portrait of a woman with a mental illness, whose punishment was essentially a social construct; those who were considered mad were indeed locked up without any documentation. Insanity was portrayed as bad and certainly dangerous. However, by the time Jane Eyre was actually published, this view was already out of step with current attitudes of the day as political awareness was changing and a commission had been set up by the government to look into the treatment of mentally ill with the finding that it was important change the environments in which they were held.