In Tolstoy’s time debates about sexuality and female emancipation (the “Woman Question”) were inseparable from fundamental decisions regarding how Russian society was to be organized. Were women to be maternal or not, educated or not, autonomous or not? Such questions were tied to thorny economic, religious, legal, and political issues. Tolstoy’s oeuvre reveals his intense engagement with contemporary debates, as well as his increasingly radical ideas about how such problems should be resolved. Anna Karenina is arguably among Tolstoy’s less extreme statements on sex and gender, yet it can be read to imply that a woman cannot sever the bonds of marriage and stay alive. The Kreutzer Sonata goes so far as to suggest that only radical chastity, even if it leads to humanity’s extinction, can free people from the degradation, commodification, and violence that are inevitable consequences of sexual relations. In What is Art? Tolstoy establishes a symbolic link between the sexual marketplace, the art marketplace, and finally all marketplaces – and thus, it seems, all of modern civilization.

Russian novels are in intense, ambivalent dialogue with the European tradition; Tolstoy’s take up the British and the French in particular. In Anna Karenina, Tolstoy reminds us that adultery is an ever-present threat in the British family novel, as it is in the novel of sensation. Like Tolstoy, Mrs. Henry Wood and Mary Elizabeth Braddon contrast the dynamics of different marriages. They also set adultery in the context of a system that works against women. In Wood’s East Lynne, Carlyle not only forgives his dying ex-wife, but declines to indict her former lover for murder; as he says, “I leave him to a higher retribution: to One who says ‘Vengeance is mine.’” This quote becomes Tolstoy’s epigraph.

As Russia went through an age of great reforms during Tolstoy’s adult years, relations between spouses, parents and children, siblings, and extended kin all evolved to match their changing society and its ideals. While Tolstoy was well aware of the debates about the state of the Russian family that raged at mid-century, his critique of the family talked past that of many of his contemporaries to focus on the moral issues closest to his heart. By mid-century many people considered the Russian family to be a backward institution based on patriarchal tyranny. Jurists struggled to rewrite imperial family law, while figures across the political spectrum debated the “Woman Question.” Tolstoy’s views evolved along different lines. He went from idealizing the traditional patriarchal family (through the 1860s), to acknowledging its flaws (1870s), to rejecting the family as an ultimate life goal (1880s onward). His ultimate ideal left no place for sexual love and was based on impersonal service to a higher cause. Ignoring all the quotidian realities of actually belonging to a real family made of real people, Tolstoy infuriated his wife with his abstract talk of living for the soul, while she managed the household and oversaw their large family.

Tracing the evolution of Brontëan Gothic into sensation fiction between the late 1840s and mid-1860s, this chapter explores the dialogue between Victorian Gothic novels with a domestic setting and contemporary debates about gender known as the Woman Question. Representing the home as the site of violence, infidelity and dysfunction rather than as the tranquil refuge envisioned by domestic ideology, the fiction examined here is informed by, and even explicitly alludes to, topical controversies regarding marriage and gender roles sparked by such events as Caroline Norton’s campaign to reform child custody law, the passage of the Matrimonial Causes Act and the establishment of the civil divorce court. Yet, while their representation of women’s domestic entrapment has feminist undertones, these ideologically conflicted works also echo anxieties about the breakdown of separate spheres reminiscent of the period’s conservative discourses. These anxieties are most evident in the portrayal of the sexually deviant woman, a highly controversial figure in Victorian culture, and one depicted in these examples of domestic Gothic with pronounced, and often aesthetically complex, ambivalence.