Constance Trescot

by S. Weir Mitchell

In *Constance Trescot*, S. Weir Mitchell offers a late-nineteenth-century American novel of psychological observation, social nuance, and moral testing. The narrative centers on a cultivated woman whose inner life is shaped by love, duty, and the constraints of genteel society, and it reflects Mitchell's characteristic interest in the tensions between emotional sincerity and social performance. Written in an elegant, measured prose style, the book belongs to the tradition of post-Civil War domestic and society fiction, yet it is distinguished by an unusually attentive rendering of temperament, feeling, and ethical conflict. Mitchell—best known as a Philadelphia physician, neurologist, and man of letters—brought to his fiction a trained sensitivity to the workings of mind and body. His medical career, together with his broad literary ambitions, informed his portrayals of nervous strain, self-discipline, and the complex pressures placed upon educated women and men in modern society. In *Constance Trescot*, these interests converge in a fiction that is both socially observant and psychologically exact. This novel is especially recommended to readers interested in American realism, women's inward experience in nineteenth-century fiction, and the crossover between medical and literary ways of understanding character. It rewards attentive reading with intelligence, grace, and historical insight.

326 pages, Kindle Edition

First published September 27, 2015

About the author

Silas Weir Mitchell was an American physician and writer.

During the Civil War he had charge of nervous injuries and maladies at Turners Lane Hospital, Philadelphia, and at the close of the war became a specialist in neurology. In this field Weir Mitchell's name became prominently associated with his introduction of the rest cure, subsequently taken up by the medical world, for nervous diseases, particularly hysteria; the treatment consisting primarily in isolation, confinement to bed, dieting and massage. His medical texts include Injuries of Nerves and Their Consequences (1872) and Fat and Blood (1877). Mitchell's disease (erythromelalgia) is named after him.

Reviews

[Elizabeth · Rating 5 out of 5]

Probably Mitchell's best novel. Constance Trescot decides to make life a living hell for the man who killed her husband. She succeeds!