In this ambitious book, Helena Michie explores the “larger cultural work of transformation” (xv) that honeymoons perform, “the movement away from the birth family to an affective, legal, and social identification with the conjugal couple” (xvii–xviii). Drawing on fiction, advice literature, and archival or published accounts of sixty-one relatively elite Victorian couples, she analyzes this transformation as it takes place in time (during wedding trips of less than a week to more than two months) and across space (through travel within the United Kingdom and to the continent). Integrating literary and historical methods, Victorian Honeymoons invites scholars of sex, gender, and marriage to reflect on what we can and cannot know about this elusive feature of marital experience, compelling us to look at our own scholarly norms and disciplinary conventions with a critical eye.

However brief or extended, however far from or close to home the newlyweds travel, Michie argues, all honeymoons have some common generic features and shared ideological purposes. One is to produce “the conjugal gaze” (12), a way of seeing that makes two into one, as holy marriage itself was supposed to do. Although much less well documented in diaries and letters, another function is to produce bodily intimacy through married sex, a second dimension of creating “one flesh.” And a third is to install the “heterosexualizing imperative” (79) at the level of the individual subject, thus privileging one affective orientation over the many possible prior ones a subject would entertain. Not only does the honeymoon forward the “obligatory transition from birth to conjugal family” (58), separating women from mothers and sisters and, in some cases, issuing in “a real loss of connection” (61), by detaching a person from promiscuous attachments to “friends” of the same sex, it also requires a “realignment of sexual and gender identifications” (77). On this account, the chief cultural work of the Victorian honeymoon is to reduce any given couple's multiplicious array of possible bonds to the smallest possible number, so that baby will make just two. (That the wives of John Addington Symonds and Oscar Wilde are among the eight women Michie positively identifies as becoming pregnant on their honeymoons is one of the richer ironies of her sample.)

These broad theses, particularly the last, are open to challenge. Michie too readily assigns a normative shape to the conjugal couple, without considering how changing conceptions of marriage and family over the course of the long period she studies might dramatically differentiate the experience of Sara and Henry Nelson Coleridge—first cousins who married in 1829—from that of previously unrelated partners, such as Emma Gifford and Thomas Hardy who married in 1874. Providing age at marriage or remarriage as well as information about prior inter- or intrafamilial relationships, which weddings often reinforced rather than compromised, would enhance the usability of her sample. That said, Michie excels at illustrating the complexities within the transformations she traces, juxtaposing the somewhat stultifying cultural expectations for the honeymoon with evidence from her primary sources and fictional accounts of (mostly) failed or unhappy honeymoons. The overall argument of the book thus fully acknowledges both the gap between precept and practice and the lack of evidentiary material concerning married sex: indeed, the wedding night, resituated within the broader context of the honeymoon, comes to figure “as a way of thinking about the possibilities and limits of historical scholarship” (xiv) when it comes to what we can say or surmise about conjugal bodily intimacies.

Michie self-consciously implicates herself in the desire for definitive knowledge of such intimacies in relation to her key source, the diary of Martha Rolls Macready, within a long, fascinating third chapter on “the many kinds and levels of knowledge that might contribute to a substantive and nuanced epistemology of Victorian sex” (105) for both the Victorians and the Victorianists. Returning again and again to Macready's diary, the final chapter includes an annotated version of it as well as a speculative fiction of Michie's own invention about the Macready honeymoon. Pursuing “the promise of intimate revelation” from the diary, Michie knowingly turns to the freedoms of fiction when her own generic expectations—“that a diary can tell us more than a novel, that readers of and in the archive can finally literally hold in their hands the key to that always elusive enterprise of Victorian sexuality” (101)—are frustrated. I suspect that some readers will dislike this chapter, while others will think it the best in the book.

But if my own response is any guide, I doubt that such differences of opinion will coincide with the disciplinary divisions that Victorian Honeymoons both presupposes and challenges. As a historicist literary critic, I see the “real methodological differences” (xvii) that Michie attributes to contemporary historians and literary critics, while still substantive, as much more negotiable than they were a decade or two ago: Michie is herself now a maker not only of “symptomatic readings” (xvii) but also of charts and tables. A book such as Seth Koven's Slumming: Sexual and Social Politics in Victorian London (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004), strongly informed by contemporary theory, surely indicates that historians and literary critics increasingly share many common tools. On the literary side, in Between Women: Friendship, Desire, and Marriage in Victorian England (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007), which could very profitably be read alongside Michie’s, Sharon Marcus advocates “just reading” (or attending to surfaces over depths) as an alternative to symptomatic reading, thus problematizing the practice that Michie takes as central to the methodological and disciplinary differences she posits and opening up ways of reading that many historians, I think, would find congenial. But even in, or perhaps because of, its investment in making the silences about married sex speak via fictive means, Victorian Honeymoons itself constitutes strong evidence for a new convergence between literary and historical method. Lucidly written, scrupulously documented, and imaginatively rendered, this book persuasively and, at times, contentiously demonstrates that taking an integrated, interdisciplinary view of the past can form a wholly different picture from those we have previously, separately imagined.