Monstrous Kinships is a study investigating the connection between realist fiction of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and the psychoanalytic approach of John Bowlby's attachment theory. Combining personal experience with the creative impulse, Shelley's Frankenstein, Melville's Pierre, Hardy's Jude the Obscure, Crane's Maggie: A Girl of the Streets, and Dreiser's An American Tragedy exposed the durable and disastrous effects of child abuse in the larger social conflicts of industrialization, poverty, and class relationships.