Lucy Snowe is a stoic young Englishwoman. Beset by adverse circumstances, on a momentary whim she travels to Belgium to seek her livelihood as a teacher in a girls' boarding school. There, surrounded by giddy pupils, under the control of the cunning school matron, wooed by an eccentric professor, and visited by the ghost of a nun, Lucy begins her adventure in true gothic fashion.

In The Descent of Man Darwin addresses many of the issues raised by his notorious Origin of Species: finding in the traits and instincts of animals the origins of the mental abilities of humans, of language, of our social structures and our moral capacities, he attempts to show that there is no clear dividing line between animals and humans. Most importantly, he accounts for what Victorians called the 'races' of mankind by means of what he calls sexual...