Description
Whereas Education of the Senses focused on the sexual attitudes and practices of the nineteenth-century bourgeoisie, The Tender Passion concentrates on their notions of love. No less revisionist than he was in his first volume, Gay argues here that the Victorians were able not only to enjoy their sexuality but to know love in its most exalted sense. The realities of love for the Victorians, he shows, came much closer to their ideals than many have thought. Gay delves into a huge body of material, from philosophical treatises to medical texts, from letters and diaries to works of fiction. The book is replete with fascinating insights into the lives and works of individual Victorians, Dickens, Stendhal, Wagner, Oscar Wilde, Beatrice Potter and Sydney Webb, among them, and his discussions range from the "discovery" of homosexuality to the ways love was diverted or disguised in music and religion.
