Not every Victorian admired the Song of Songs. For the prominent Unitarian minister William Maccall, writing in 1862, it was the “chief stench in the Bible” (5). His viewpoint was an extreme one, but it needs to be understood in the light of the higher criticism that was debunking the idea that the text had been written by King Solomon. Instead of being an elaborate allegory of the love between God and the Church, as had been the traditional Christian interpretation, it was increasingly taken at face value as an account of the passionate love between a man and a woman. Dau’s stimulating book does not tackle the question of what this startling text was doing in the Bible, but it does help us to more fully appreciate its effect on nineteenth-century writers and artists. The radical potential of the Song of Songs lay, firstly, in its foregrounding of the viewpoint of a woman, which made it an “ideal enterprise for feminist theology,” and, secondly, in its passionate physicality (9). If this was a coded depiction of a chaste and pure relationship, then it was one that understood chastity and purity in eroticized terms. It was this pivot between spirituality and sensuality that provided inspiration for those who were struggling to discover an eroticism that was beyond sin. A different book would have focused on Christian ecstasy within marriage but Dau, provocatively, focuses on various forms of deviations from sexual norms, including same-sex desire and the erotic and romantic lives of celibates.

What Sex, Celibacy, and Deviance does not do is tell the reader very much about the Song of Songs itself, since the reader is assumed to have a degree of specialist knowledge. Dau’s core methodology is to use case studies of particular texts, images, and objects to explore the reception and influence of the Song of Songs as an intellectual and emotional inspiration. This involves looking at work by Charlotte Brontë, Thomas Hardy, Edward Burne-Jones, Phoebe Anna Traquair, Augusta Theodosia Drane, Christina Rossetti, Simeon Solomon, John Gray, and Katherine Bradley and Edith Cooper (the aunt and niece couple who wrote as Michael Field). There is, therefore, an interesting mix of well-known and under-studied figures. This is replicated in the choice of works for analysis, ranging from such familiar favorites as Rossetti’s poem “Goblin Market” (also, coincidentally, from 1862) to other items new to this reviewer, including Traquair’s painted piano.

Dau writes passionately, particularly in her gripping and affecting account of the religiously floral last days of Bradley and Cooper, who both died of cancer within months of each other in 1913 and 1914 respectively. This approach has the advantage of providing the opportunity for illuminating close readings, but it also has some disadvantages. In some cases, the influence of the Song of Songs was clearly paramount, but in others it was simply one of a range of textual and visual inspirations. Then there is the question of why this particular set of materials was selected for study, bearing in mind that some of them are more focused on sex, celibacy, and deviance than others. It also begs the question of what has been left out. The passionate kisses of Oscar Wilde’s Salomé (1893) get a brief mention but could have inspired a chapter in their own right, and a wider discussion of Solomon’s Jewishness would have been helpful in order to relativize the otherwise Christian responses to the Biblical text.

Such minor concerns notwithstanding, this book will be very useful for those wishing to study the selected materials, but it also makes for provocative reading for anyone interested in trying to understand those Victorians who chose not to have sex. Dau has some important things to say about what she terms the “rape culture” in the Old Testament as speaking to women who knew all too well that marital rape was not a crime in English law (53). It could also, although Dau does not explore this, speak to Victorian reception of the Sodom narrative (Gen. 19) as an exploration of the perils of male sexual assault.

The book begins with sections on married life before moving on to those who lived, or dreamed of living, in homosocial spaces. One such was Frederick William Faber, a (probably queer) Roman Catholic convert for whom clerical celibacy was a species of “religious manliness” because it involved living without, as Dau puts it, “the tender comforts of domesticity” (74). Sisterhood was, by contrast, for Rossetti, a bond as strong as marriage and one replete with kisses and love which were truly sweet in comparison with the meretricious fruits sold by her goblin men.

The Victorian art is not handled quite so adroitly as the literature, and there are, unfortunately, no illustrations. This is a particular problem when the author discusses little-known images such as Burne-Jones’s designs for a stained-glass window in St. Helen’s Church, Darley Dale, Derbyshire, depicting texts from the Song of Songs. A further sense beyond the visual only briefly makes an appearance in an intriguing discussion about female musicians. Another book, therefore, waits to be written: one in which literature, art, and music are given equal weight. In a coda Dau reflects on the areas she believes she has neglected, including working-class reception and political dimensions. The tone here, as in many passages, is that of an engaging commentator sharing her long-term plans for research. This is not the final word on the subject, but then, it seems, it was not intended to be.