"The originality of Ender"s approach and her insightful readings of literary and psychoanalytic texts make this a significant contribution. She proceeds in a circular fashion, returning to look at the same works in different contexts. By the end, I was thoroughly won over, entranced."--Martha Noel Evans, author of Fits and Starts: A Genealogy of Hysteria in Modern France In a book both brilliant and lucid, Evelyne Ender explores the issue of sexual identity in the fiction, criticism, and psychoanalytic writings of the nineteenth century. She focuses on the figure of the hysteric, which, she says, came to represent a mind haunted by the questioning of gender.