The woman's novel is a genre which sits uneasily between high and low culture. In this book it is argued that this hybrid status reflects the ambivalent position of its authors and readers, as educated women caught between identification with a male-gendered intellectual culture and a counter-experience of female embodiment. Through six case studies, the representation of a "mind/body" problem is explored in the fiction of Rosamond Lehmann, Elizabeth Bowen, Elizabeth Taylor, Margaret Drabble, A.S. Byatt, and Anita Brookner.