Women Writing the Neo-Victorian Novel: Erotic "Victorians" focuses on the work of British, Irish, and Commonwealth women writers, such as A.S. Byatt, Emma Donoghue, Sarah Waters, Helen Humphreys, Margaret Atwood, and Ahdaf Soueif, among others, and their attempts to re-envision the erotic. Kathleen Renk's study analyzes the phenomenon of neo-Victorian fiction and its relationship to contemporary culture, specifically focusing on women writers and the ways in which the erotic is conceived in neo-Victorian fiction, and how this re-conception relates to the interests of contemporary feminism. Renk argues that in their re-envisioning of the Victorian novel, these women writers highlight classical concepts of erôs, and, in addition, they gravitate toward Audre Lorde's idea that the erotic is not "plasticized sensation" but is "the lifeforce of women, [it is] creative energy empowered.