Both Geraldine Jewsbury, in her novel The Half Sisters (1848), and Christina Rossetti, in her narrative poem "Goblin Market" (1862), use the device of a pair of sisters for exploring the nature of women and expanding their audiences' understanding of women, their capacities, and the limitations placed on them by convention. Women, generally speaking, were viewed as either good or bad, with the domestic and un-domestic or, perhaps, the dutiful and undutiful, as the terms of the definition. Within these two categories individual differences among women were usually described in terms of their location on a horizontal continuum of goodness and badness and only two vertical characteristics made much of a basis for differentiation: class (with the associated question of wealth) and nationality (perhaps associated with the question of religion as well). The essential element in the good/bad distinction was the question of female chastity. It mattered little, for instance, that a woman was well-born and wealthy or poor and a superior housekeeper and mother if she was unchaste, or even particularly immodest. Variation in class approaches to the particulars of behavior were, of course, important and what was immodest in a working-class woman in terms of dress or excessive education, for example, might not be considered immodest in a middle-class woman who would, instead, be enjoined from taking an unwarranted interest in the practical business of the world outside the home or from moving too freely, while unassisted, about the world outside a limited number of sanctioned locales. And for upper-class women still more differences distinguished them from the lesser classes, most notably in questions of leisure and worthwhile pursuits. Jewsbury and Rossetti created characters in the sisters Bianca and Alice, Laura and Lizzie who effectively refuted such a limiting view of women. A discussion of the differences in their approaches will demo...