Anna Silver examines the ways nineteenth-century British writers used physical states of the female body-hunger, appetite, fat and slenderness-in the creation of female characters. She argues that anorexia nervosa, first diagnosed in 1873, serves as a paradigm for the cultural ideal of middle-class womanhood in Victorian Britain. Silver uses the works of a wide range of writers (including Charlotte Brontë, Christina Rossetti, Charles Dickens, Bram Stoker and Lewis Carroll) to demonstrate that mainstream models of middle-class Victorian womanhood share important qualities with the beliefs or behaviors of the anorexic female. | Victorian Literature and the Anorexic Body by Anna Krugovoy Silver, Hardcover | Indigo Chapters