Between Women: Friendship, Desire, and Marriage in Victorian England.(book)(Brief article)(Book review)

Between Women: Friendship, Desire, and Marriage in Victorian England SHARON MARCUS. Princeton Univ., $65 (368p) ISBN 978-0-691-12820-7; paper $19.95 ISBN 978-0-691-12835-1

Queen Victoria would not be amused. In this persuasively argued, provocative book, Marcus makes the case that women in late 19th-century England engaged in intimate friendships--which "the Victorians ... believed cultivated the feminine virtues of sympathy and altruism"--that often had a sexual component of visual objectification and even sexual intimacy. Marcus, associate professor of English and comparative literature at Columbia, probes a wide range of the period's culture--novels of Dickens, …