SOURCE: "'Varieties of Pain': The Victorian Sickroom and Brontë's Shirley," in Modern Language Quarterly, Vol. 48, No. 3, September, 1987, pp. 254-78.

In the following essay, Bailin views Charlotte Brontë's Shirley as exemplary of the way in which Victorian novels portray the events and experiences surrounding a character's illness as reflective of human life in general.

There is scarcely a Victorian narrative without its ailing protagonist whose physical suffering is metaphorically, or even causally, related to the larger social and moral disorder of the world outside the sickroom walls. The physician in these works, with his privileged access to the intimate revelations and bodily exposure of the sickroom and his interest in the hidden causalities of disease, often provides an apt analogue for the realist author as diagnostician of social ills and scrutinizer of the minds and hearts of his or her characters. One thinks in this regard of...