Health and unhealth: the condition of women in the fiction of Virginia Woolf, Dorothy Richardson and May Sinclair

This thesis analyses the relationships between women and unhealth in Virginia Woolf’s, Dorothy Richardson’s and May Sinclair’s early twentieth-century fiction, where unhealth is conceived as an umbrella term to accommodate the intersections of ‘physical’ and ‘mental’ disease, illness and sickness. Through a succession of close readings interlocked with critical approaches to life, work, care and medicine, it argues that these writers’ female characters become attached to unhealth, and that such recurring attachments affect the meaning of ‘woman’ more broadly. Drawing together scholarship in the medical humanities and disability studies to capture the contours of a pervasive socio-cultural construct brought to bear on these works, this thesis models an engagement with literary health that looks beyond perceived inherencies of biology or identity. Chapter 1 examines the motifs through which women’s domestic attachments to unhealth are figured in Woolf’s The Voyage Out (1915), Mrs Dalloway (1925) and Flush: A Biography (1933). Chapter 2 focuses on how similar attachments are made ordinary in Richardson’s Pilgrimage (1915–67), attending to domestic and professional arenas. Chapter 3 turns to the impacts of institutionalized medicine on the condition of women in Sinclair’s The Three Sisters (1914) and Life and Death of Harriett Frean (1922). This thesis finds that these writers do not understand women as ‘unhealthy’, but rather orchestrate a series of thematic, symbolic and structural bonds and commitments to produce a conceptual collocation between ‘woman’ and ‘unhealth’. An afterword underlines the significance of the thesis’s use of unhealth and its attendant reappraisal of the relationship between the medical humanities and disability studies