This 1999 study explores the importance of ideas and narratives of ancestry and kinship in constructing Victorian identity.

List of illustrations; Acknowledgements; Textual note: the novels; Introduction; 1. Oral and written genealogies in Edgeworth's The Absentee; 2. A mirror for matriarchs: the cult of Mary Queen of Scots in nineteenth-century literature; 3. Pedigree, nation, race: the case of Disraeli's Sybil and Tancred; 4. 'A sort of Royal family': alternative pedigrees and class in Meredith's Evan Harrington; 5. Pedigree, sati and the widow in Meredith's The Egoist; 6. Pedigree and forgetting in Hardy; 7. Geology and genealogy: Hardy's The Well-Beloved; Conclusion; Notes; Bibliography; Index.