ABSTRACT
As will be clear even from my schematised and over-simplified account of two particular examples of medical discourse, nineteenth-century discourses on woman were deeply contradictory, and they became increasingly unstable during the period spanned by this study. These contradictions and instabilities constitute the ideological matrix within which and by which the women’s sensation novel and the New Woman writing were produced. Both types of fiction were involved in a complex negotiation of the categories of the proper and improper feminine, and with the (apparently) opposing versions of femininity which I have associated with the names of Acton and Drysdale.
