In today's enthusiasm for interdisciplinary scholarship, some of the more conventional of the cross-disciplinary bedfellows begin to seem like old married couples, their significant methodological and evidentiary differences thrown under the same much-laundered duvet. This frequently happens with literary and historical scholarship, through which that maverick offspring, cultural studies, can eclipse two of its more staid parents by conflating its objects of study without attending to their evidentiary demands. By contrast, Sharon Marcus's wide-ranging study Between Women: Friendship, Desire, and Marriage in Victorian England exemplifies the marriage of historical and literary research. Marcus evinces a kind of scholarly rigor all too often obscured by the emergence of what has become widely known as the “cultural text.”

Marcus's subject is female friendship and its heretofore un(der)acknowledged stature in Victorian marital relations—heterosexual and homosexual alike (more on the latter designation below). Reading female friendship as a discarded by-product of the male-female antagonism that feminist and “separate spheres” scholarship has all but canonized in Victorian criticism, Marcus argues for the utility of female friendship in marshaling heterosexual marriage plots, calling them “a transmission mechanism that kept narrative energies on track” (3). Marcus's analysis of female friendships leads her to a more provocative series of claims in later chapters, based upon her contention that “our contemporary opposition between hetero- and homosexuality did not exist for Victorians, and that Victorians were able to see relationships between women as central to lives also organized around men” (19). Marcus explores the sexual, emotional, and psychological relations between women in the acknowledged tradition of Eve Sedgewick's analysis of male homosocial bonds in Between Men. Among her forays into female relationships are girlhood friendships, the culture of dolls, and the aesthetics of fashion plates—all of which variously manifest the appeal of women to other women.

Marcus's fine readings sometimes suffer for the pressure she puts on them to be all-pervasive. Her claims about the universality of female friendship enabling marriage can be overstated, especially given the selectivity of her fictional examples. Referring to Trollope's Can You Forgive Her? Marcus writes with broad strokes that “eroticized friendship between women is a necessary lubricant for facilitating marriage between a woman and a man, and … female intimacy is the friend of conjugal happiness, not its foe” (254). What would Marcus make of the opposite scenario in Dr. Thorne, another Trollope novel, wherein “bosom friends” Mary Thorne and Beatrice Grantly sadly part ways when Mary's incipient romance with Beatrice's brother Frank gains purchase? The heterosexual relationship for most of that novel structurally opposes the friendship between the two women, and yet it is nevertheless consummated in marriage at the novel's end, the happy event after which the two friends reunite. Such contrarian plots prompt us to ask whether eroticized female friendship is indeed the hidden secret of successful marriage plots, or if friendship between women more widely signifies a successful socialization process that in turn can predict fitness for that ultimate exercise in social mores—marriage?

At times, Marcus extends friendship between women to lesbianism and/or “female marriage” in an ambiguous way. She makes a bold assertion about the option of Victorian women to marry each other, at a time when the realist novel is nearly overdetermined by the heterosexual marriage plot. Marcus argues that, “in the 1860s and 1870s, a period when … many still associated sodomy with sexual acts absolutely opposed to nature and virtue, the female couple was accepted as a variation on legal marriage, not treated as a separate species” (201). Maybe this is because female partnership in Britain was standardized through countless examples, historical and fictional, of women living together without the label of marriage and its implied sexual relationship: I am principally referring to the convention of unmarried sisters setting up house together, perhaps after the death of parents. This arrangement was economically practical and yet not confused with marriage. Elizabeth Gaskell's Cranford, about a community “in the possession of the Amazons,” explores sister-based households and other permutations of female partnerships in its explicit avoidance of heterosexual marriage plots, and would have been a provocative text for Marcus to admit into her study.

Between Women also argues that female marriage contributed to “making marriage a plastic institution” that in turn transformed its legal codifications toward more democratic principles in the later century. “Women in female marriages were thus in the vanguard of the movement to modernize marriage, for their relationships anticipated the increasing equality of husbands and wives gradually written into law over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries” (194). But the historical women that exemplify this state for Marcus, like Frances Power Cobbe, Charlotte Cushman, and Rosa Bonheur, are already or otherwise so exceptional that their couplings with other women can seem unremarkable among their other convention-defying achievements. Indeed, in what way was Frances Power Cobbe not in the vanguard, and would a convincing case of female marriage as a relatively commonplace state of affairs perhaps be better tied to “odd women” less extraordinary?

The strength of Between Women comes from Marcus's skills as a reader of those textual implications of female relations that previous scholarship has cordoned off in its various allegiances to heteronormative interpretation. At times the avowed universality of her findings surpasses her evidence—particularly in regard to her extension of a plot dynamic about female friendships to mid-Victorian novels in general. But it is a testament to Marcus's achievement in Between Women that her claims make objections or omissions seem like discoveries. Between Women will probably spark a number of dissertations devoted entirely to exceptions like those noted above, as disagreeing with Marcus could become its own strain of Victorianist practice.