ABSTRACT
This chapter emphasizes Affinity as being “post-” in a different way, namely, in its dependent but critical relation to an important body of second-wave feminist Victorian social history and literary criticism dating from the 1970s onward. Affinity revisits the relationship between the middle-class philanthropic woman and the working-class woman, criminal or otherwise, in need of practical and emotional assistance, a tie which is characteristic of mid- and late-Victorian liberal reform efforts. Affinity is a cold-blooded exercise in genre. In its intense focus on the relationship between Margaret and Selina, the novel invites its reader to engage with it as though s/he were reading a twentieth-century lesbian romance. Not only a romance, Affinity also shares in the conventions of the late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Gothic novel with its suggestions of the permeability of different levels of existence. Affinity in the novel functions as a synonym of embodied affective, emotional, and at times sexual ties between women.
