V!’s Reviews > A Very Queer Family Indeed: Sex, Religion, and the Bensons in Victorian Britain > Status Update

“I have just woken up with a terrible pain in my left arm. I hope I die with dignity like Dr Arnold.” Rather than calling for help, he is duly writing down the heart attack that killed him and once again comparing his image with someone else.

"…his love of beauty leads him to convert to Roman Catholicism in rebellion at the aesthetic ugliness of his low Protestant upbringing;"

"The transition from the Victorian to the Edwardian era could be shaped as a violent severance between the religious fervor of an older generation and the need to escape such oppression or hypocrisy by a younger. At a crossroads, Oedipus needs to murder his father."

“Good Lord, give me a personality,” she prays. “I feel exactly like a string of beads, ... carried about till they seemed as if they had some real coherence.”

“We prayed, but didn’t come near to God. I mean I didn’t.”

“It was thought that a denial of Christianity was liable to shake the fabric of society, which was itself founded upon Christian religion.”

“At age twenty- five, still single, she did not know the facts of life.”