Review: <i>Imagining Women’s Property in Victorian Fiction</i>, by Jill Rappoport

function as figures for a deep, and deeply conflicted, queer desire for kin.Incest is much less figural in the final chapter, which confronts how Eric Gill's queer Catholicism and Orientalist Decadence began in sexual and communal experimentation and ended with outright abuse.Rather than a queer artistic utopia in which such binaries as East and West and the sacred and the erotic were juxtaposed and reconciled, Gill's artistic colony became the patriarchal family redux, ruled by a central male artist for his own gratification.Mahoney covers a lot of cultural ground here and does it remarkably well.The archival work is thorough, yet the book never reads as simply a collection of quotations from letters and diaries.She offers adept readings of literary texts, visual arts, and nonfiction accounts.She expands the reach and importance of late nineteenth-century Decadence by reading its trace as something more than a mere cultural hangover; in her selections we discover a vibrant, if sometimes exploitative, tradition that echoes well past the death of Wilde.Moreover, her emphasis on the formation of non-standard families registers the cultural possibilities of opening up traditional kinship formations to queer reconstruction and reappropriation.The combination of these two elements results in an insightful and telling account of early twentieth-century cultures.