The Tender Passion

The Bourgeois Experiece: Victoria to Freud

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 historial 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 hte Victorians is an enthralling subject."—Anthony Storr, The Spectator