Family Likeness: Sex, Marriage, and Incest reminds me of optical illusions in which, first, you see a vase and, then, as foreground and background reverse, you see instead a couple kissing. Mary Jean Corbett brilliantly demonstrates that the plots we have taken to be the foreground of the nineteenth-century novel are, in fact, accompanied by other, equally important plots, ones we have not seen because of our assumptions about how kinship, marriage, and the family work. Developing a literary critical framework based in anthropology, the law, and the history of science, Corbett shows that nineteenth-century fiction is as much concerned with attachments to first or birth families as to second or conjugal families. The nineteenth-century interest in affective attachments to those related by blood has remained invisible to modern critics because of assumptions about incest and marital exchange. Corbett's groundbreaking work shows that those assumptions need to be revised: “conceptions of incest, like configurations of the family or household, have differed quite dramatically over time” (36–37).

Corbett historicizes incest by referencing two nineteenth-century debates. The first involved cousin marriage, to which, as Corbett notes, “no stigma was attached in Great Britain until about the 1860s” (67). The second involved the question of whether husbands should be allowed to marry their deceased wife's sister, or wives, their deceased husband's brother. (Such marriages were illegal in England between 1835 and 1907.) Debates about these unions marked Victorian awareness that individuals were, in fact, likely to be attracted to those who were part of their immediate family. But while cousin marriage was not defined as incestuous, marriage to the deceased wife's sister was. Since marriage made husband and wife one flesh, the wife's sister became the husband's sister rather than his sister-in-law. Together these two debates show that the distinction between “a relation ‘in blood’ and an in-law” (39) that we now assume to be absolute did not hold in the nineteenth century.

Defining the boundary between consanguineous and affinal attachments as fluid allows Corbett to make visible nineteenth-century plots that involve first family ties. Chapter 2 contrasts Jane Austen's Mansfield Park to Pride and Prejudice, showing how, while the latter seems to celebrate bonds between strangers, the former endorses marriage between cousins that is modeled on the attachment Fanny Price feels for a sibling, her brother William. Even in Austen's earlier novel, Corbett argues, satisfactory marriages are as much about the pleasure that sisters feel in remaining close to each other as about marriages to strangers. Chapter 3 discusses two novels that deal with a husband's potential attraction to his sister-in-law: Harriet Martineau's Deerbrook and Felicia Skene's The Inheritance of Evil narrate the tensions that arise when a woman, in marrying, chooses to take her sister with her into her conjugal home. In chapter 4, Corbett reads Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre as a narrative that moves from being adopted by maternal relations to finding a more satisfactory connection with one's paternal relations.

As Family Likeness proceeds, Corbett situates her readings of novels in a social context. Chapter 3 references legal debates about marriage to the deceased wife's sister. Chapter 4 reads Brontë in relation to nineteenth-century anthropological work about the family: the writings of Henry Maine on adoption and of John McLennan on marriage. Chapter 5 links discussions of family identity in George Eliot's The Mill on the Floss to Darwin’s, Galton’s, and George Henry Lewes's writings on breeding. Here, the biological and racial implications of narratives about endogamous as opposed to exogamous exchange that Corbett has raised from the beginning of her argument become explicit. As she notes initially, Victorian positions on cousin marriage and incest were inflected by class difference. It was acceptable for the upper classes to marry their own kind but not the working classes. Using the work of Anna Laura Stoler, Corbett refers to unions such as cousin marriage as a form of “white endogamy”(13), a joining that binds like to like and maintains social differences.

By the 1860s, novelists had become increasingly aware that “kinship is and always was a made thing” (60). Elizabeth Gaskell's 1864 novel Wives and Daughters raises the issues found in Austen, Martineau, Skene, Brontë, and Eliot: cousin marriage, attachment to a sister who is not quite a sister, adoption, and interbreeding. But in Gaskell those ties are represented not as facts but as fictions that can be manipulated. In chapter 6 and the next, the family also becomes more complex as novelists consider not just first and second but also third families, the social groups formed when a person remarries. In chapter 7, Family Likeness returns to its own origins. Corbett's book opens discussing Woolf, incest, and marriage to the deceased wife's sister. Woolf marks the appropriate historical end to Corbett's study since the act that legalized marriage to the deceased wife's sister and the Punishment of Incest Act were finally passed in 1907 and 1908, respectively.

Woolf is particularly useful because the novelist's life and work have been read in terms of modern conceptions of incest and family trauma. Family Likeness shows that, even with a novelist like Woolf, writing when the modern conception of kinship was beginning to emerge, we need to understand such concepts as historically inflected. Recognizing the fluidity of nineteenth-century models of kinship lets us see that Woolf, like the other novelists in Corbett's study, “seeks to reconstitute, recuperate, refigure, and reimagine family life in affectively gratifying egalitarian forms, such that individuals will have the opportunity to reconceive their relations in new ways on new models” (200). Corbett's work is important because it asks readers to resee not just the nineteenth-century novel or even nineteenth-century models of kinship but the conception of the family on which so much modern criticism has been based.