"What happens when two women love the same man? How do they negotiate the conflict between the need for sexual fulfilment and their loyalty to the other woman who may be a friend or even a sister? This book examines female rivalry as a distinctive theme in women's fiction.

As Diana Wallace shows the female-identified erotic triangle, where two women are rivals for the same man, is a narrative pattern that had a special resonance for women writers in the 1920s and 1930s, when a population imbalance led to a 'surplus' of women."--BOOK JACKET.