This module situates the work of various women writers of the Regency period in literary and historical contexts. The main texts under discussion are by Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Hays, Jane Austen, Mary Shelley, and Maria Edgeworth. The unit considers themes which - although not exclusive to women's writing at this time - occur strikingly frequently in the work of Regency women. These themes include sanity, madness and ideas about the mind, and literary devices such as the love-mad woman. Health, ill-health and the development of medicine are central to these fictions and the course, and we also discuss the figure of the doctor, the quack and the 'psychiatrist' in these texts. We look at writings by Regency women travellers whose destinations ranged from Italy to Bath, Sweden and Revolutionary France.