The contributors to Gender Roles and Sexuality in Victorian Literature explore the way gender roles were constructed in literature between 1850 and the turn of the century.

Whilst recognizing and building upon the enormous importance of both Victorian and twentieth-century perceptions of women's roles and the way these relate to assumptions about women's sexuality, this book is also concerned with more recently developed interests in the creation of male gender roles and different concepts of masculinity, and consequently with relations between, and within, the sexes. The second half of the nineteenth century saw a mounting attack upon the middle class family ideal which had been painstakingly developed in the preceding era; but the radicals did not have it all their own way.

The unprecedented complexity of competing visions of both genders is a feature of the period, which saw gradually mounting tensions between sexual radicals and conservative upholders of traditional roles.