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."