Kathryn Hughes is emerita professor of life writing at the University of East Anglia and a literary critic for The Guardian. She is the author of Victorians Undone: Tales of the Flesh in the Age of Decorum and George Eliot: The Last Victorian.
Her latest book is Catland: Louis Wain and the Great Cat Mania.
At the Guardian Hughes tagged "five of the best books that track how the Victorians gradually unravelled and learned to let loose." One title on the list:
The Other Victorians by Steven Marcus (1966)Read about the other entries on the list.
At the height of the sexual revolution, Steven Marcus, a professor at Columbia University, produced a book suggesting that the Victorians could swing with the best of them. Delving deep into medical sources on taboo topics including masturbation, as well as such out-and-out pornographic texts as My Secret Life by the pseudonymous “Walter”, Marcus rewrites Victorian England as an erotic playground. Within weeks of appearing in Britain in 1966, The Other Victorians sailed past Nancy Mitford’s biography of Louis XIV, The Sun King, to top the national bestseller list. The Times described the book as “ghastly stuff” and derided Marcus as “a student of smut”. These days, the book is revered as a gamechanger.
--Marshal Zeringue
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