This ground-breaking study successfully challenges the traditional tendency to regard Charlotte Brontë as having existed in a historical vacuum. Using texts ranging from local newspapers to medical tomes belonging to the Brontës, Sally Shuttleworth explores Victorian constructions of psychology, sexuality and insanity, and traces the ways in which Charlotte Brontë's texts operate in relation to this complex framework. Shuttleworth offers a reading of Brontë's fiction informed by a new understanding of the psychological debates of her time.