Contents -- Preface to the First Edition -- Introduction to the Second Edition: The Madwoman in the Academy -- Part I. Toward a Feminist Poetics -- 1. The Queen's Looking Glass: Female Creativity, Male Images of Women, and the Metaphor of Literary Paternity -- 2. Infection in the Sentence: The Woman Writer and the Anxiety of Authorship -- 3. The Parables of the Cave -- Part II. Inside the House of Fiction: Jane Austen's Tenants of Possibility -- 4. Shut Up in Prose: Gender and Genre in Austen's Juvenilia -- 5. Jane Austen's Cover Story (and Its Secret Agents) -- Part III. How Are We Fal'n?: Milton's Daughters -- 6. Milton's Bogey: Patriarchal Poetry and Women Readers -- 7. Horror's Twin: Mary Shelley's Monstrous Eve -- 8. Looking Oppositely: Emily Brontë's Bible of Hell -- Part IV. The Spectral Selves of Charlotte Brontë -- 9. A Secret, Inward Wound: The Professor's Pupil -- 10. A Dialogue of Self and Soul: Plain Jane's Progress -- 11. The Genesis of Hunger, According to Shirley -- 12. The Buried Life of Lucy Snowe -- Part V. Captivity and Consciousness in George Eliot's Fiction -- 13. Made Keen by Loss: George Eliot's Veiled Vision -- 14. George Eliot as the Angel of Destruction -- Part VI. Strength in Agony: Nineteenth-Century Poetry by Women -- 15. The Aesthetics of Renunciation -- 16. A Woman-White: Emily Dickinson's Yarn of Pearl -- Notes -- Index.