This dissertation argues that the narrative fiction of nineteenth-century Britain was critically informed by an engagement with melancholy. In addition to capturing the psychological and emotional struggles of the age, melancholy is essential to the formal aesthetic of writers like Shelley, Gaskell, Eliot, and Hardy. Elizabeth Gaskell's "The Poor Clare" examines the way that melancholy functions as a both a medium of social power and social contagion. In Thomas Hardy's "Barbara of the House of Grebe," melancholy produces an aesthetic crisis, breaking down ontological distinctions between the aesthetic and the real. Mary Shelley's Matilda argues that melancholy lives in language and corrupts speech, while George Eliot's The Lifted Veil uses melancholy to critique to her central aesthetic and ethical values: realism and sympathy. In these works, melancholy is not simply a subjective state romanticized by poets, but a dynamic fully integrated in their aesthetic, without which, they could not write.