Table of Contents

Acknowledgments

Preface: “Only, my secret’s mine, and I won’t tell”

An Erotic Note

A Queer Note

Introduction: Adolescent Reverie

Reduplicative Desires

“In Which the Story Pauses a Little”
Sapphic Narcissa

Collecting Loss

Postscript

List of Illustrations

Notes

Works Cited
Index 211

About the Author

Carol Mavor is Associate Professor of Art at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She is the author of Pleasures Taken: Sexuality and Loss in Victorian Photographs, also published by Duke University Press.

Reviews

"To those accustomed to the detached tone of the academic monograph, Carol Mavor's stance in Becoming will seem daring. From the effusive acknowledgements onwards, the author thrusts herself to the front, so that her particular appreciation of what she studies becomes both subject and critical method."--Lindsay Duguid, TLS, October 15, 1999 "The author's perspectives on Victorian and contemporary issues of intimacy, up new perspectives for the reader, who thus feels inspired to stop and dream for a while, hoping to do so as acutely and as inventively as Mavor does." -Joseph Litvak, author of Strange Gourmets: Theory, Sophistication, and the Novel