"In the flirtation plots of novels by Jane Austen, Charlotte Bronte, and W. M. Thackeray, heroines learn sociability through competition with naughty coquette-doubles. In the writing of George Eliot and Thomas Hardy, flirting harbors potentially tragic consequences, a perilous game then adapted by male flirts in the novels of Oscar Wilde and Henry James.

In revising Gustave Flaubert's Sentimental Education in The Age of Innocence, Edith Wharton critiques the nineteenth-century European novel as morbidly obsessed with deferred desires. Finally, in works by D. H. Lawrence and E. M. Forster, flirtation comes to reshape the modernist representation of homoerotic relations.".

"In The Flirt's Tragedy: Desire without End in Victorian and Edwardian Fiction, Richard Kaye explores these and other subjects as he makes the case for flirtation as a unique, neglected species of eros that finds its deepest, most elaborately sustained fulfillment in the nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century novel."--BOOK JACKET.