The debate on whether middle-class women were constrained or liberated by consumer culture in the nineteenth century goes back a very long way, at least to Emile Zola's marvelous novel Au Bonheur des Dames in 1883. Krista Lysack throws her hat into the ring with this work that explores, mainly through various literary texts, the complex ways in which women and consumerism interacted in Victorian England. In line with recent positive assessments of the impact of metropolitan department stores, Lysack highlights how shopping or even “just looking” provided multiple opportunities for middle-class women to forge their own identities. The introduction lays out the theoretical underpinnings of the study, particularly Michel de Certeau's influential writings on consumption as a site of creativity and resistance. The argument is elaborated through five chapters that consider “alternative discourses of consumption” (7), which are intended to uncover the pleasures as well as the dangers of women's experiences of shopping. These case studies, arranged in chronological order, discuss some well-known texts and subjects: Christina Rossetti's poem Goblin Market (1862), from which the title of the book is taken; Mary Elizabeth Braddon's Lady Audley's Secret (1862); George Eliot's Middlemarch (1871); Michael Field's Sight and Song (1892); and the consumer tactics of the Women's Social and Political Union, articulated by the periodical Votes for Women before World War I. Some reflections on a confident, modern shopper—Elizabeth Dalloway in Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway (1925)—serve to round off the narrative.

Lysack locates her texts, more or less securely, within the appropriate historical and cultural context and offers many interesting insights on them. The general thrust, made by other scholars, about the benefits of the new consumerism for middle-class women, is undoubtedly correct if unsurprising. This is familiar territory, after all, and although Lysack does have some useful things to say, she has a tendency to overstate her case. Egged on by de Certeau, she sees resistance everywhere: window shopping, profligate spending, suffragette shop keeping, and the “performative tactic” of shoplifting (58) are all seen to undermine capital's homogenizing power. Some attempt to differentiate these various practices would have helped to improve the book. A number of themes also deserved more sustained attention. Lysack underlines the long-standing effort to masculinize consumption and the importance of thrift, for example, and cites from a fascinating article in 1863 by John Bucknill, who observed that “we can find more pity for the poor woman who purloins a piece of lace … than for the smirking fellow who has caught her in his haberdashery trap by lying advertisements” (57). The moral critique of consumerism, as well as anxieties caused by the prospect of unregulated consumer desire, particularly female desire, continued through the second half of the nineteenth century and beyond; witness the success, for instance, of middle-class cooperatives such as the Civil Service Supply Association, a body ignored by Lysack and by Deborah Cohen in her engaging study, Household Gods: The British and Their Possessions (New Haven, CT, 2006). The latter does shed a good deal of light on the engagement of middle-class men with consumer culture, however, a dimension overlooked entirely by Lysack. Although the organized consumer does get a look in toward the end of the book, in the shape of suffragette exclusive dealing and shop keeping, the author has nothing to say about the way working-class women organized in far greater numbers as “women with the basket” in the Women's Co-Operative Guild, their efforts patronized but not ignored by Virginia Woolf herself, of course. This is a strange omission, given the author's fond memories of shopping trips to the Swan Valley Co-Op. Moreover, the reasons why suffragette shop keeping ultimately failed are not fully explained (it was pushed aside by militancy); Lysack states only that it was “a contingent rather than a permanent undertaking” (169).

Finally, Lysack often draws rather odd conclusions from her evidence. She relates a story, for example, of an elderly female shopper at Liberty's who was thoroughly disconcerted when she mistook her own reflection in one of the store's mirrors for that of another shopper, to such an extent that she apologized to the image. A funny episode one might think, with a number of possible meanings, but Lysack discerns yet another moment of resistance: “Amid the mirrored displays at Liberty's and the manufactured look of an oriental bazaar, the fractures of this consumer spectacle were readily visible” (27). To whom, one wonders. Then later we are told how Katherine Bradley and Edith Cooper (“Michael Field”), who shared a passionate love for things as well as for poetry and each other, once stole a painting they admired from a friend's holiday home. This was no simple act of theft, readers are assured, but instead was analogous to their project in Sight and Song, which was to block “the premise of possession that often underwrote masculine connoisseurship, in which an art object that is purchased free and clear is thought to be owned absolutely” (135). Perhaps, though, I would not have invited them round to my house again. There is illumination in this book and some good, close reading. Unfortunately, however, in the end, little that is new is brought to this crowded market.