“[She] broke new ground when, drawing on feminist scholarship and the work of the French poststructuralist Michel Foucault, she began teasing out the hidden socio-sexual subplots in writers like Charles Dickens and Henry James. […] Several of her essays became lightning rods for critics of poststructuralism, multiculturalism and gay studies – most notoriously ‘Jane Austen and the Masturbating Girl’.”