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he was head of the asylum on Robben Island, which also served as a leper colony and a political prison, much later to house Nelson Mandela for eighteen years.
    The only Edmunds child whose behaviour seems to have been unaffected by the early family drama was Mary Burn, the middle sister. At the age of twenty-four, on 18 September 1856 in Henley onThames, she married the Reverend Edward Foreman of Amberley in Sussex. Sister Mary seems to have lived an ordinary middle-class Victorian life, giving birth to five children, the youngest of whom went up to Cambridge. But Mary’s elder sister’s acts plunged her into a different world. She attended Christiana’s trial, helped where she could and also cared for her tireless mother, who died only in April 1893, five years before Mary herself. There is no record of what Mary thought of Christiana’s passionate delusion.

    5. Sex and the Victorian Hysteric
    As a young woman classified as a hysteric in the 1850s, Christiana would have been understood as suffering from an illness that engaged both her nerves and almost certainly her uterine system. This latter incorporated what we would now name ‘sexual’, a word whose meaning shifted rapidly from that time on. J. Crichton-Browne, the influential medical director of the West Riding Asylum, lecturing to students at the Leeds Medical School, points out:
    ... mental phenomena in health and disease ... are influenced in no slight degree by the sexual functions, and they exercise a reciprocal control ... The period of the rut in animals is accompanied by mental activity, which borders upon morbid excitement, while the gravid state of the uterus in females of our own species may lead not merely to change of temper, morbid appetites, and capricious eccentricity, but to chorea [tics, or involuntary movement], somnambulism, amaurosis [darkening or loss of vision], convulsions, or mental derangement. On the other hand, a condition of mental agitation may derange the menstrual discharge, and ideas may modifiy the nutrition of the sexual apparatus.
    Crichton-Browne goes on to give an example of a hysterical pregnancy in which the power of the delusion induced changes in the Vascularity of the uterus and the ovaries’. In this lecture he wants to distinguish between what he calls ordinary hysteria – which involves ‘incontinence of the emotions’, ‘moral obliquity’, ‘towering egotism’ and ‘positive delusions’ – and the even more serious ‘hysterical mania’. While ‘the mental affection is the more prominent feature’ in common hysteria, in hysterical mania both the uterus and the brainare definitely in play. Crichton-Browne is a believer in the physiological base of mental illness, and although he states that there is no necessary continuum between his first and second kind of hysteria, it only takes a small increase in ‘intensity and persistency’ for recognized ‘mental derangement’ of the second sort to come into effect.
    It’s clear that, for Crichton-Browne, the very condition of being female and possessing a uterus is a dangerous business, prone to tumble one into insanity at the merest provocation. The very biological factors that differentiate women from men – menstruation, pregnancy, lactation and menopause – are seen as trigger points for madness. The whole reproductive system enchains women to uterine, and thus nervous, disease. Meanwhile female desire, itself, as the leading Victorian gynaecologist William Acton underlined, giving scientific back-up to the period’s ideological presumptions, is an aberration. In his Functions and Disorders of the Reproductive Organs (1857), which deals mainly with male sexuality and the danger to vital energy that masturbation constitutes, he notes that ‘happily for society’, the majority of women ‘are not very much troubled by sexual feeling of any kind’.