Synopses & Reviews
Education of the Senses, the first volume of Peter Gay's The Bourgeois Experience, was published in 1984 to enormous critical acclaim--and controversy. Now, in The Tender Passion, Gay continues his eloquent, psychoanalytically informed exploration of the Victorian era and its middle classes.
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 sexulaity 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.
Particularly compelling is the opening section in whch Gay analyzes in depth the separate love stories of two young men, one English and one German--stories which, in Gay's view, "dramatize some of the careers in love open to the middle class in the decades of Victoria and beyond."
A work of remarkable learning, analytical sophistication, and stylistic verve, The Tender Passion is an impressive addition to a monumental historical enterprise.
About the Author -
Peter Gay, Sterling Professor of History at Yale University, is the author, most recently, of Freud for Historians.
The latest volume in the acclaimed historian's mounumental series
Focuses on the Vioctorians' notions of love
Ffilled with fascinating glimpses of individuals
Draws on huge body of letters, diaries, and other original sources
Synopsis
Education of the Senses, the first volume of Peter Gay's
The Bourgeois Experience, was hailed as "a subtle, elegant, profound and prodigiously researched book" (
Washington Post Book World), "the most learned, as well as the wittiest, survey of human sexuality ever to be published" (
The New York Times). In this, the second volume, Gay continues his eloquent, psychoanalytically informed exploration of the lives of the Victorian middle classes. Whereas
Education of the Senses focused on Victorians' sexual behavior and attitudes,
The Tender Passion concentrates on their notions of love. Gay argues that, contrary to popular belief, Victorians were able to know love in its most exalted sense. "Freud was only summing up the current wisdom," he writes, "when he observed that 'a completely normal attitude in love' requires the uniting of 'two currents,' the 'tender and sensual.'"
Beginning with the stories of two young men, one English and one German, Gay proceeds to a wide-ranging inquiry into the ideal and real meaning of love for the Victorians. Based on a vast amount of material--including philosophical treatises, medical texts, letters, diaries, works of fiction, and art--the book explores such topics as homosexual love, class differences in the perception of love, and the diversion of love in music and religion. There are also fascinating insights into the lives of eminent 19th-century figures, including Dickens, Stendhal, Balzac, Wagner, and Beatrice Webb. A work of remarkable erudition and analytical sophistication, The Tender Passion is an impressive addition to "one of the major historical enterprises of the decade" (The New York Review of Books).
About the Author
About the Author -Peter Gay, Sterling Professor of History at Yale University, is author of Weimar Culture; Freud, Jews and Other Germans; Style in History, and, most recently, Freud for Historians. He won a National Book Award for the first volume of his acclaimed study, The Enlightenment: An Interpretation.