The Heavenly Twins

If you are a Victorian novel aficianado as I am, you should thoroughly enjoy Sarah Grand's sprawling, strange story. The eponymous twins are bizarrely, intriguingly atypical as far as nineteenth-century characters go. Grand gives a picture of feminism in its embryonic stage--the woman was certainly before her time, as are most of her female characters. Fear not, however; this is no simple "men-bad-women-good" tale. Nastiness and nurture are fairly evenly distributed between the sexes. Although the story meanders at times between its main branches, it is well-written and worth resurrecting for the 1990s. My main quibble is that Grand's voice tends to take over at certain moments (especially when she's getting angry about her society). But please read this book anyway, especially for its shockingly non-Victorian ending.