ability to work and the question of what constitutes appropriate work not only form a central theme of Victorian domestic fiction, but also structure its often extensive cast of characters. As the self-help ideologies that came to inform many life narratives of the period appeared to clash with the valorization of social interdependence, domestic novelists increasingly resisted the typecasting of dependence as a weakness or affliction. Instead, they proposed networks of care that centred on familial and pseudo-familial relationships, radiating out from the immediate family to enclose a domesticated society in an idealizing image of care taking. At the same time, they critically engaged with prevalent identifications of the moral and aesthetic as well as the economic meaning of labour. This rendered the disabled female artist a particularly intriguing embodiment of conflicting issues revolving around work. Charlotte Yonge s The Pillars of the House ( 1873) features a disabled artist who is also a working woman. The uniqueness of Geraldine Underwood's characterization rests in a selfreflexive reworking of stereotypes, a reworking in which prejudices against women artists are counterpoised with a reconstruction of the working female invalid. A close analysis of Yonge 's novels shows why it is vital that the problems caused by impairment within the family are not sentimentalized. This exploration also brings to the fore the significance of female invalids for popular fiction s often critical approach to typecasting along class or gender lines. Among the most intriguing components of Pillars, in fact, is the reordering of gender paradigms through the pairing of a bookseller's maternal qualities and his lame sister's career as an artist. A disability studies approach provides a new perspective on the disconcerting ambiguities with which Victorian concepts of affliction have become associated, while a close reading of specific texts brings into question some of its premises as well. Pillars, a multi-plot novel by a religious, didactic domestic woman writer, seems at once amorphous in form and, in its realization of a religious agenda, homogeneous in its ideals. Read as a narrative that is centrally about affliction, however, it achieves a decisive coherence. The eldest Underwood son, Felix, puts domestic cares before a career and forfeits his class status. He enters trade, and the tediousness of daily labour in the shop affects