Reality and Representation of Eighteenth Century Women: Exploring the Experience of the Female Body

Abstract

This thesis uses the idea of ‘harmonisation,’ which is the use of multiple data streams, such as art and medical manuals, women’s literary representations and personal diaries, to develop a clearer understanding of the way pregnancy affects the female body both physically and socially. Central to this study is the literary presentation of women's bodies, particularly those in Jane Austen’s fiction, which will serve as a prime example of the fictional body, to be read alongside real material bodies. By comparing these sources, this study demonstrates that Austen’s fictional bodies operate in direct relation to the lived female bodies documented. Austen's work is therefore treated as a cultural text shared by body realities that women recorded in their diaries. The neglect of pregnancy, childbirth, and maternal loss in Austen’s novels is not a sign of their irrelevance but reflects the cultural constraints of polite society; reading Austen’s fiction as a curated narrative of silence provides a critical lens for interpreting the explicit testimonies of diarists.

Using harmonisation as a methodological framework brings these sources into dialogue, arguing that literature and art offer significant though partial and regulated representations of historical experience. Women’s diaries provide explicit testimony of bodily vulnerability, pain, emotional and social strain, and maternal risk and mourning. At the same time, Austen’s fiction offers a socially sanctioned, aesthetically controlled version of the same world, delicately hinting at the effect of motherhood on the female body and social standing. Drawing on Disability and Variability Studies, this thesis further conceptualises pregnancy as a bodily state situated between disability and impairment, illuminating how reproductive bodies were perceived, regulated, and disciplined. In doing so, the research provides a corrective history that transforms our understanding of literature and life. It demonstrates that the long eighteenth century was fundamentally reliant upon the unacknowledged, vulnerable, and heavily policed female body, enriching scholarship across literary, medical, and body studies, as well as women’s writing.

Date of Award	3 Jul 2026
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	University of Winchester
Supervisor	Chris Mounsey (Supervisor) & Gary Farnell (Supervisor)