This book explores desire between women as a form of "spiritual materialism" in writings by Luce Irigaray, Charlotte Brontë, and George Eliot. To begin with the study's underlying paradox, "spiritual materialism": the author wishes to understand why the act of grasping materialities—a sob in the body or the body itself—has so often required a spiritual discourse; why materialism, as a way of naming matter-on-its-own-terms, and material relations that still lie submerged, hidden from view, evoke the shadowy forms we call "spiritual."