The Bourgeois Experience from Victoria to Freud: The Tender Passion

The Bourgeois Experience: Victoria to Freud #2

by Peter Gay

The Tender Passion looks at the Victorian middle classes' ideal and real notions of love. It explores an anxiety-provoking time when the boundaries between erotic expressiveness and reserve began to give way, changing the experience of love. "One of the major historical enterprises of the decade. . . . An enterprise requiring a daring and breadth of knowledge possessed by few other contemporary historians."―Gordon A. Craig, New York Review of Books "Gay's writing has an artist's feel for the flow and rhythms of language, and his extensive and exquisitely managed research is blended into a unified structure that consistently serves the author's purpose."― San Francisco Chronicle "The vicissitudes of the 'tender passion' in both the fiction and the real lives of the Victorians is an enthralling subject."―Anthony Storr, The Spectator

Genres: History, Nonfiction, European History, 19th Century, Victorian, Cultural Studies

520 pages, Paperback

First published March 13, 1986

About the author

Peter Joachim Gay was a German-American historian, educator, and author. He was a Sterling Professor of History at Yale University and former director of the New York Public Library's Center for Scholars and Writers (1997–2003). He received the American Historical Association's (AHA) Award for Scholarly Distinction in 2004. He authored over 25 books, including The Enlightenment: An Interpretation, a two-volume award winner; Weimar Culture: The Outsider as Insider (1968); and the widely translated Freud: A Life for Our Time (1988).
Gay was born in Berlin in 1923, left Germany in 1939 and emigrated, via Cuba, to the United States in 1941. From 1948 to 1955 he was a political science professor at Columbia University, and then a history professor from 1955 to 1969. He left Columbia in 1969 to join Yale University's History Department as Professor of Comparative and Intellectual European History and was named Sterling Professor of History in 1984.
Gay was the interim editor of The American Scholar after the death of Hiram Haydn in 1973 and served on that magazine's editorial board for many years. Sander L. Gilman, a literary historian at Emory University, called Gay "one of the major American historians of European thought, period".

Reviews

[Lauren Albert · Rating 4 out of 5]

So far, of the two books in the series, I can say that they cannot be easily summed up. Gay is painting a portrait, not telling a narrative history. His portrait is of diversity. An interesting question would be whether his evidence is skewed. Could someone go through the evidence (letters, diaries, etc.) and find a different picture? He writes that just because the bourgeois did not talk or write about these things (usually), does not mean they did not feel or do them. The examples he picks go against the grain of the usual image of the Victorians. But he is, after all, choosing the examples. Perhaps other people would find that the Victorians were, indeed, Victorian?

[Brenda Clough · Rating 4 out of 5]

Excellent as always, but very like the other volumes in the series.