Between 1870 and 1910 male authors were actively engaged with imagining new possibilities for women, at the same time as the central female figure continued to function as a troubling and unreachable object of aesthetic desire. This book examines these inscrutable female characters who were the ground on which fiction reinvented itself as Art.

1. Introduction 2. Wilkie Collins and Narrative Containment 3. Anthony Trollope: Gender, Law and the Psychological 4. Density, Will and Desire: Henry James, Aesthetics and the Subjective Turn 5. Emily's Will: George Gissing, Wage Labour and Aesthetic Desire 6. Sexuality and National Containment: E. M. Forster 7. Aim, Object and Fictional Strategy: Freud and Case Study Narrative Coda: The Burial of 'The Dead'