“Still Lives: Physical Disability and Late Style in Romantic-era Women’s Writing"

The book “Still Lives: Physical Disability and Late Style in Romantic-era Women’s Writing" will reveal how a set of female authors who experienced chronic illness and physical disability render palpable that experience as stillness, an acute awareness of debility both in time and past the time for a cure. In their last, unfinished works, Mary Robinson (1757–1800), Charlotte Smith (1749–1806), Jane Austen (1775–1817) and Mary Prince (c.1788–after 1833) represent stillness as an embodied, pained experience of temporality that corresponds neither to lyric suspension nor to individual development.