SOURCE: Jenkyns, Richard. “Victoria's Secret.” New York Review of Books 42, no. 19 (30 November 1995): 19–21.

In the following review of Patricia Anderson's When Passions Reigned and The Bourgeois Experience: Victoria to Freud, Volume IV: The Naked Heart, Jenkyns comments on the vast scope and wealth of interesting details in Gay's work.

Sixty or seventy years ago the word “Victorian” was used by many cultivated people as a term of abuse: it seemed self-evident that the Victorians' art was either hideous or odiously sentimental, and their prudishness a moral deformity. Walking through Kensington Gardens, the philosopher and historian R. G. Collingwood had a revelation: as he looked at the Albert Memorial, he decided that ugliness could be a spiritual evil; not to be disgusted by this monstrosity was to be stunted as a human being. Yet in the 1960s it was being used on posters to lure tourists to London. The superior...