Well into the nineteenth century, experts were likelier to think that fiction reading caused madness than cured it. A doctor warned in 1806 that reading ‘affects the organs of the body, and relaxes the tone of the nerves.’ As late as 1877, another expert ‘could tell of one young woman of my acquaintance, of fine education,’ ‘who gratified a vitiated taste for novel-reading till her reason was overthrown, and she has, in consequence, been for several years an inmate of an insane asylum.’

Leah Price, What We Talk About When We Talk About Books (2019)