Education of the Senses

With this book, Peter Gay begins a project of enormous scope and imagination: a multi-volume study of the European and American middle classes from the 1820s to the outbreak of World War I. he Bourgeois Experience, which will eventually comprise at least five volumes, explores the much-neglected but all-important role that human drives and emotions played in the shaping of Victorian culture. In Education of the Senses Gay re-examines the sexual behavior and attitudes of the Victorians, overturning many ttpersistent myths about the era and challenging, in particular, the notion that bourgeois women could not enjoy sexuality. Immense in scope yet finely detailed, this book abounds in fascinating glimpses of individual lives. A provocative and absorbing study, Education of the Senses marks an auspicious beginning to a project that promises to change the way we view the past.