SOURCE: Annan, Noel. “In Bed with the Victorians.” New York Review of Books 33, no. 18 (20 November 1986): 8–9, 12, 14.

In the following review of The Bourgeois Experience: Victoria to Freud, Volume II: The Tender Passion, Annan praises Gay's wide range of primary source materials, insightful psychological analyses, and richly detailed examples.

[In The Bourgeois Experience] Peter Gay has set himself the monumental task of reinterpreting Victorian middle-class life. In this volume [The Tender Passion] he has chosen the ever interesting topic: What did the Victorians do in bed? Was bourgeois marriage—that institution which demanded virginity before marriage monogamy after it, and, within it, abstemious intercourse for procreation and not for pleasure—was this repressive norm responsible for producing that familiar Victorian ailment, “nervousness?” Did it drive men to prostitutes for sexual satisfaction? Certainly not, retorts Gay. It was not the norm. The stereotype of the innocent dutiful wife continually pregnant and...