Ecdysis: Rewriting the Victorian Madwoman

My creative writing thesis consists of a lesbian novella that responds to Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847) and Henry Lawson’s ‘The Drover’s Wife’ (1892), and the streams of feminist criticism and literature incited by their representations of madness and Otherness. This is accompanied by a study of Jean Rhys’ Wide Sargasso Sea (1966) and Kate Jennings’ Snake (1996), that interrogates how these feminist writers challenge the oppressive characterisations of madness and mental illness in these Victorian works; and demonstrates how their revisions have informed the creation of my own lesbian narrative about social oppression, madness, mental illness, and internalised homophobia.