This book examines the gulf between principle and practice in the lives of late-Victorian intellectuals and social reformers known collectively as the "new thinkers". It combines social history, biography and feminist analysis. The author scrutinizes the marital and sexual relationships of this group of men and women - among them Havelock Ellis, Olive Schreiner, Eleanor Marx, Edward Aveling, Sidney and Beatrice Webb, George Bernard Shaw, H.G. Wells and Margaret Sanger.