SOURCE: Storr, Anthony. “The Victorians in Love.” Spectator 256, no. 8240 (14 June 1986): 29–30.

In the following review, Storr compares The Bourgeois Experience: Victoria to Freud, Volume II: The Tender Passion to the first volume of the series, arguing that the second volume is “better organized and easier to grasp as a whole” than the first.

This [The Bourgeois Experience: Victoria to Freud, Volume II: The Tender Passion] is the second volume of a massive enterprise. Professor Gay has as his object the delineation of middle-class culture from the beginning of the 19th century to the outbreak of the first world war. Since Gay is a convinced Freudian, his first two volumes are largely, though not exclusively, concerned with attitudes towards sex and love. He asks

What, in short, was the bourgeois experience in the university, in the marketplace, in the polling booth, in the museum, in bed? It is Sigmund Freud...