Explores the frequent use of the blush in Victorian novels as a sign of characters' inner emotions and desires. This title illuminates literature's relation to the body and the body's place in culture. It presents a trajectory for the nineteenth-century novel's shift from the practices of manners to the mode of self-consciousness.
"As brightly as the blush that is its subject, this new study of the English novel blazons an extraordinary critical talent: even after we have absorbed her powerful sense that the skin is deeper, more densely lined with social text than we ever imagined, her prismatic sensibility--an exorbitant exercise of what Jane Austen, who would know, called 'the right of a lively mind'--must remain one of a kind."--D. A. Miller
