The madwoman in the attic: the woman writer and the nineteenth-century literary imagination

pt. 1.; Toward a feminist poetics

; ch. 1.; Queen's looking glass: female creativity, male images of women, and the metaphor of literary paternity

; ch. 2.; Infection in the sentence: the woman writer and the anxiety of authorship

; ch. 3.; Parables of the cave

; pt. 2.; Inside the House of Fiction: Jane Austen's tenants of possibility

; ch. 4.; Shut up in prose: gender and genre in Austen's juvenilia

; ch. 5.; Jane Austen's cover story (and its secret agents)

; pt. 3.; How are we fal'n?: Milton's daughters

; ch. 6.; Milton's Bogey: partriarchal poetry and women readers

; ch. 7.; Horror's twin: Mary Shelley's monstrous eve

; ch. 8.; Looking oppositely: Emily Brontë's bible of hell

; pt. 4.; Spectral selves of Charlotte Brontë

; ch. 9.; Secret, inward wound: The Professor's pupil

; ch. 10.; Dialogue of self and soul: plain Jane's progress

; ch. 11.; Genesis of hunger, according to Shirley

; ch. 12.; Buried life of Lucy Snowe

; pt. 5.; Captivity and consciousness in George Eliot's fiction

; ch. 13.; Made keen by loss: George Eliot's veiled vision

; ch. 14.; George Eliot as the angel of destruction

; pt. 6.; Strength in agony: nineteenth-century poetry by women

; ch. 15.; Aesthetics of renunciation

; ch. 16.; Woman: white: Emily Dickinson's yarn of pearl.