IN MASCULINE DESIRE:The Sexual Politics of Victorian Aestheticism, his study of the role of male same-sex attraction among Victorian aestheticist writers, Richard Dellamora refers to Elaine Showalter’s claim that Gerard Manley Hopkins was one of a series of writers who tried to reclaim male literary dominance from women writers in the wake of George Eliot’s death in 1880. Dellamora proposes instead what he thinks a more likely source of creative anxiety: “Insofar as he may appear at times to regard literary creativity as a male prerogative, his anxieties are better referred to a celibate homosocial environment than to the creative ascendancy of Victorian women writers” (56). But these two anxieties may not be entirely separate. Recent critical studies have shown that the mid-Victorian novel, whether written by women or men, was a form dominated by domestic and marriage plots, by the depiction of the bourgeois family and the construction of gender roles as principles of social regulation. Thus the emergence from the shadow of Eliot and the turning of aestheticist literature and art toward various alternative constructions of gender and desire — not merely new claims of masculine prerogative but also articulations by women writers of positions resistant to Victorian gender regularities — would be intimately connected.