6 “This terrible business”: Frances Burney’s Mastectomy Letter and Discourses of Breast Cancer

Chapters in this book

1. Frontmatter i
2. Contents v
3. Acknowledgments vii
4. Introduction: The Discursive Landscape of Women Writers and Medical Ideas in the Long Eighteenth Century 1
5. 1 Medical Women and Hysterical Heroines in the Work of Jane Barker 34
6. 2 “What art thou Spleen”? Anne Finch’s Poetics of Melancholy 66
7. 3 Lady Mary Wortley Montagu and Competing Narratives of Smallpox 99
8. 4 “Dreadful operations”: Ailments of Maternity in Hester Lynch Thrale Piozzi’s Journals 133
9. 5 “Rendered weak and wretched by a variety of concurring causes”: Women and Consumption in Mary Wollstonecraft’s Mary, A Fiction 166
10. 6 “This terrible business”: Frances Burney’s Mastectomy Letter and Discourses of Breast Cancer 193
11. Conclusion 215
12. Notes 223
13. Index 291