Contents -- Illustrations -- Acknowledgments -- INTRODUCTION: The Female Relations of Victorian England -- Overview -- Historical and Disciplinary Borders -- How This Book Engages Scholarly Debates -- How I Came to Write This Book -- Conclusion -- PART ONE: Elastic Ideals: Female Friendship -- CHAPTER ONE: Friendship and the Play of the System -- Female Friendship in Feminist Studies -- Victorian Women's Lifewriting and Relationships between Women -- Female Friendship as Gender Norm -- Friends and "Friends" -- The Repertory of Friendship -- "Purified and Made One in Jesus" -- Friendship, Kinship, Marriage -- CHAPTER TWO: Just Reading: Female Friendship and the Marriage Plot -- The Form of the Plot -- Female Amity and the Companionate Marriage Plot -- Female Amity and the Feminist Marriage Plot -- The Double Marriage Plot: Friendship as Cause and Effect -- Unamiable Villette: Lucy Snowe's Passion -- PART TWO: Mobile Objects: Female Desire -- CHAPTER THREE: Dressing Up and Dressing Down the Feminine Plaything -- Fashion and Fantasies of Women -- Discipline and Punishment in the Fashion Magazine -- Live Dolls -- CHAPTER FOUR: The Female Accessory in Great Expectations -- The Female Dyad and the Origins of Desire -- Gender Mobility I: Masculinity as Castoff -- Gender Mobility II: Pip as Doll and Fashion Plate -- The Sentimental Education of the Female Dyad -- PART THREE: Plastic Institutions: Female Marriage -- CHAPTER FIVE: The Genealogy of Marriage -- Female Marriage in the Nineteenth Century -- Female Marriage and Victorian Marriage Reform -- The Debate over Contractual Marriage -- Victorian Anthropology and the History of Marriage -- Same-Sex Unions and the History of Civilization -- CHAPTER SIX: Contracting Female Marriage in Can You Forgive Her? -- Trollope, Feminism, and Female Marriage.

Female Marriage and Contractual Marriage in Can You Forgive Her? -- Marriage as Forgiveness: Primitive Contract and Modern Punishment -- The Persistence of Female Relations -- CONCLUSION: Woolf, Wilde, and Girl Dates -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Illustration Credits -- Index -- A -- B -- C -- D -- E -- F -- G -- H -- I -- J -- K -- L -- M -- N -- O -- P -- Q -- R -- S -- T -- U -- V -- W -- Y -- Z.