This timely conference takes contemporary representations of female sadness as its critical object, asking how we might read the ‘sad girl’ as an artefact of the historic – late capitalist and neoconservative – present. While mental health remains largely the preserve of Biomedical and/or Psychology departments, this conference will foreground interdisciplinary and intersectional humanities perspectives on gendered emotion, thereby widening the scope of what counts as knowledge, and who count as experts, on mental health and wellbeing.

In this proposed collection, we interrogate the complexity of nineteenth-century attitudes toward literacy in young women and girls. This project examines representations of girls reading in nineteenth-century transatlantic texts, exploring the tensions found in various works between support and critique of reading and considering how such representations frequently challenge the common perception that girls’ reading was harmful.