Explores the frequent use of "the blush" in Victorian novels as a sign of characters' inner emotions and desires. Through lively and textured readings of works by such writers as Jane Austen, Elizabeth Gaskell, Charles Dickens, and Henry James, this book illuminates literature's relation to the body and the body's place in culture.

"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