Drawing on interdisciplinary work in the field of ethics by a diverse range of thinkers, including Martha Nussbaum, Richard Rorty, Emmanuel Levinas and Paul Ricoeur, Jil Larson offers new readings of late-Victorian and turn-of-the-century British fiction. Focusing on novels by Thomas Hardy, Sarah Grand, Olive Schreiner, Oscar Wilde, Henry James, and Joseph Conrad, Larson explores the conjunction of ethics and fin-de-siècle history and culture through a consideration of what narratives from this period tell us about emotion, reason, and gender, aestheticism, and such speech acts as promising and lying.