This book argues that the queer potential of keeping relationships as demonstrated in the first chapter allows readers to reconsider what these Victorian authors are doing with characters whom conventional narrative does not accommodate. In addition to looking at the cultural work that authors perform using explicit mistress characters, the book offers ways to read for kept women when they seem to be absent from narrative, and find experiences for them that do not necessarily shore up the myth of heterosexual marriage. In this way, this project addresses the relationship between readers and authors, via the intermediary figures of kept women characters. The book encourages an active readership, and ways of seeing, and models of connection entailing a queer, ethical compassion. This reading encourages possibility for women and identities excluded from, yet bearing the weight of, conventional narrative. Such readings can appreciate narrative techniques employed by various writers, many who themselves lived beyond convention, and offer strategies for reading other seemingly exclusive texts. Thus in its reconsideration of Victorian literature, this study presents a way towards Susan S. Lanser’s “narrative justice” for kept women characters, women who choose to survive and resist in a world that acts against them. Readers can be active in offering the care work for nineteenth-century women, and women and other disprivileged people today. These Victorian narratives offer queer possibilities of destabilization, allowing readers to recognize the political potential in connections of labor, love, and space, as well as the pleasure in doing so.