This chapter explores the relationship between medicine and the novel in the long eighteenth century through a reading of the work of medical authority and novelist Jane Barker. Emphasising the rich interplay between eighteenth-century medicine and the novel, I begin with a review of criticism that considers novelistic representations of the body–mind relationship, sensibility, nerve theory, illness, disease as metaphor, and disability. I go on to suggest that Jane Barker deserves a place in the critical discussion of the relationship between the origins of the novel and the world of medicine. She was an innovator, both in her use of fiction to purvey medical knowledge and in her manipulation of such knowledge to narrative ends. In her novel Love Intrigues (1713), Barker displays her familiarity with the most modern and supposedly advanced medical wisdom, and rewrites and challenges such wisdom, sometimes drawing on older, humoural understandings of the body. Barker’s characterisation of her protagonist Galesia is evidence of a nascent psychological realism that effectively captures the heroine’s mental landscape – an effect achieved in part through her curious management of discourses of hysteria.

This chapter examines the relationship between constructions of childhood and the development of narrative fiction in Ireland in the period after the Williamite settlement. By highlighting the figure of the child as a central preoccupation of this period, I propose a fresh consideration of religious controversy, the response to Enlightenment ideas, and the development of narrative fiction in Ireland in this period. The desire to create a new and improved Ireland was at one and the same time an aspect of English colonial ideology with a long and sometimes violent history, but also an optimistic and progressive vision which drew on the radical philosophies of Locke and others. Literacy and print culture were increasingly seen as pivotal to the spread of enlightenment and the improvement of both the individual and society, but anxiety as to the loyalty of Catholics also generated ambivalence about the benefits of widespread literacy. In this essay I will argue that a significant strand of early Irish fiction emerges from a distinctive preoccupation with questions of individual and societal formation and reformation, and that there are close links between early Irish fictions and discourses of religious reform, pedagogy, and social and economic improvement.