ABSTRACT
This chapter presents an autobiography of English social theorist, Harriet Martineau. During her initial seclusion, the prolific, popular and today largely forgotten author wrote Life in the Sick-Room: Essays by an Invalid (1844) – a memoir-treatise of consolation and support for fellow sufferers and advice for the untroubled. She endured persistent, frequently severe, undiagnosed pelvic pain and backache; episodes of depression; debilitation so encompassing that she was unable to venture beyond the upstairs landing. Martineau's first book-length publication, Devotional Exercises for the Use of Young Persons (1823), comprised fourteen essays reflecting her youthful Unitarian concerns regarding such subjects as Habitual Devotion, Benevolence, the Goodness of God, the Uncertainty of Worldly Enjoyments, and the Value of Time. She situates the displacement of long illness in ten essays on such subjects as ‘sympathy’, through ‘nature’, ‘temper’ and ‘death’, to ‘becoming inured’ and the ‘power of ideas’.
