Disorderly sisters

"This book explores one of the central concerns of nineteenth-century fiction - the family - examines the literary and historical dimensions of the period's particular obsession with siblings. Historians and literary critics have long understood the crucial significance of the family to the nineteenth-century middle-class sensibility, but almost all critical analyses to date have concentrated on the "vertical" pole of the familial axis - the parent-child relationship - and very little on the "horizontal" pole - the sibling bond. This book looks beyond these analyses to show that at the core of nineteenth-century domestic ideology is the figure of the sister."--BOOK JACKET.