Sharon Marcus has made her reputation as a careful and ingenious scholar of historical and literary texts, complicating categories by attending to the world-building that individuals enact in plain sight. With Apartment Stories, her first academic book, she explored the sociohistorical terrain of the apartment building in nineteenth-century Paris and London, a middle ground between the urban landscape of the flâneur and the intimate domesticity of the home; in her next, she examined the relationships of same-sex friendship, desire, and commitment that defined female experience in Victorian