Header image: 1891 illustration from Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the d’Urbervilles, by Joseph Syddall. “Why so often the coarse appropriates the finer thus,” comments the narrator of Tess of the d’Urbervilles following Tess Durbeyfield’s fateful encounter with Alec d’Urbervilles at the Chase.[1] The exploration of sexuality within Victorian culture and literature, especially female sexuality, is extensive; Michel Foucault’s first volume of The History of Sexuality (1976), Nancy Armstrong’s Desire and Domestic Fiction: A Political History of the Novel (1987), Christopher
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