SOURCE: Auerbach, Nina. Review of The Bourgeois Experience: Victoria to Freud, Volume V: Pleasure Wars, by Peter Gay. American Scholar 67, no. 2 (spring 1998): 168–70.

In the following review, Auerbach asserts that Gay's five volumes of The Bourgeois Experience admirably explain the complexity of Victorian culture, although she observes that Pleasure Wars, the fifth in the series, is less focused and less detailed than the earlier volumes.

On the jacket of this fifth and final volume of Peter Gay's The Bourgeois Experience: Victoria to Freud, the publisher assures us that: “No one reading this concluding volume of Peter Gay's magnificent revaluation of the nineteenth century will ever again use the term Victorian as a synonym for dull.” Since I am one of the many who never did use the term Victorian as a synonym for dull, but who see, as Peter Gay does, conflict and passionate resistance within the once popular...