This book provides an approach to the lives, thought and works of the four most important English women novelists of the mid-to-late-19th century. Seen against the background of a dramatically changing world in which they grew up as contemporaries, their attitudes to such vital issues as religion, the child, the "woman question", love and sexuality, the self, and death, are examined in depth, both as they were expressed privately and as portrayed in their work. There emerges a picture of an intellectual and literary relationship that was destined to play a challenging and significant part in the development of the English novel.
