Book excerpt: To love or to write? This was the crucial question facing the major women writers oft he last century. The painful struggle between sexual relations and personal fulfillment as creative artists is constantly portrayed and re-enacted in their fiction. This book provides the first close analysis of the central struggle in the lives and writings of Victorian women authors. It demonstrates the inadequacy of attitudes formed by twentieth century sexual libertation for an understanding of feminism in Victorian writing. This study establishes a double tendency in Victorian feminism to favor love but equally to oppose it from a position of 'radical chastity'. This essential book at once articulates crucial feminist issues and also constitutes a majr statement on the sources of female creativity. -- Publisher description