Seeing Suffering in Women's Literature of the Romantic Era

As she explores tropes of illness, healing, and social justice in the writings of Mary Wollstonecraft, Charlotte Smith, and Mary Shelley, Dolan engages with a wide range of primary sources in science and medicine. She argues that the Romantic-era interest in the physiology of vision influenced the culture's understanding of suffering, and that these three authors experimented with materialist modes of seeing in order to expand the language of suffering and to claim literary authority.