Cirrus@Austlit

'Notes from Sick Rooms is a poetic erasure of a Victorian nursing manual published in 1883 for the home-nurse at a time before public health provisions, before mass hospitalisation and the widespread use of anti-biotics. The most that could be done for the ill (who is always referred to in the manual using the female pronoun) was to keep ‘her’ comfortable, clean and pacified at home. The resulting text provides a marvellously florid voice of the invalid, domestically confined woman of the nineteenth century that Gilbert and Gubar famously called ‘The Mad Woman in the Attic’.' (Introduction)

'1. Some stories demand to be told, almost physically.

'People always say that don’t they? That you can write your way out of pain, trauma, misery. That it can be spun into airy gold on the page.' (Introduction)