1. Introduction: a book by its cover "The Algonquin Cinderella"

2. The Eye of the beholder: reader as spectator

3. The Bodies and spirits of the age: competing categories of value in nineteenth-century England. Art and nature. Nature and nurture. Delicacy and health: Pygmalion's Galatea and Little Nell

4. Shaping the body to fit the eye: Austen's Persuasion as a romantic cinderella

4. Charm: the nature of art. Beginning with the beginning of Middlemarch. Mothers and harlots, bedrooms and battlefields: Hebrew scriptures and Midrash. Spenser's Una and Duessa; Milton's Dalila. The bequest of the jewel box: Scott's Ivanhoe. Thackeray's Rebeccas. Concluding Middlemarch. Jewel caskets after Middlemarch. The future of an allusion

6. Grace: the birth of breeding. Male beauty contests: Daphnis and Chloe and Wuthering Heights. The wild boy of Aveyron: Itard's diary and Shuttuck's The forbidden experiment. Coats and tales: Joseph in Hebrew scriptures, Midrash and Koran. Joseph and Daphis: Fielding's Joseph Andrews. Beauty in the beast: Wuthering Heights. Wild in the third story: Jane Eyre. Foundling of low birth: Great Expectations

7. Delicacy: the flower of health. Delicate beauty goes out: George Eliot's Adam Bede. Lilies exposed: Dinah and Susanna in Hebrew scriptures, Apocrypha, and Midrash. Crimson rose: Hetty Sorrel. Scarlet rose: Hester Prynne. Lily is rose: Dinah and Hetty. The certain beauty of health: Gissing's The odd women. The delicacy of health: Hardy's Jude the obscure

8. Conclusions: beauty beyond description. Beast in the beauty: The picture of Dorian Gray. Arrowy nose in short tense flight, eyes like drenched violets: Woolf's Orlando.