In this accessible and elegantly crafted book, Lloyd explores sexual jealousy more as a literary device than as a literary theme. She draws her examples from novels, plays, and poetry spanning many years and from many countries, mainly nineteenth- and twentieth-century France and England but also Russia, Poland, Germany, Italy, the United States, Canada, and Australia. Among the writers she treats are Proust, Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Charlotte Bronte, Trollope, Barthes, and Baudelaire.