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Marcus, S. (2007), Between Women: Friendship, Desire, and Marriage in Victorian England. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press.

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Abstract

Sharon Marcus’s Between Women: Friendship, Desire, and Marriage in Victorian England combines Marcus’s own background in literary studies with an analysis of women’s life writing to offer a compelling redefinition of Victorian relationships between women. Rejecting previous models of understanding women’s relationships which often posited female friendship and lesbianism on a spectrum fundamentally opposed to heterosexual marriage, Marcus instead offers an analysis that is highly attuned to the ways in which women wrote about their relationships in the period, drawing her conclusions from over 100 different samples of women’s life writing between 1830 and 1880 that include diaries, memoirs, and letters. Making regular reference to these works, she builds her central hypothesis that ‘Victorian society, in which marriage between men and women was a supreme value, did not suppress bonds between women but actively promoted them.’

How to Cite:

Ottaviani, L., (2026) “Marcus, S. (2007), Between Women: Friendship, Desire, and Marriage in Victorian England. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press.”, DiGeSt - Journal of Diversity and Gender Studies 13(1), 140–142. doi: https://doi.org/10.21825/digest.101165