Many of us who teach Victorian literature to undergraduate students are familiar with the kinds of questions that arise when discussing depictions of same-sex friendships in such texts as David Copperfield, Aurora Leigh, or even, in my own experience, the Sherlock Holmes stories. Are these depictions of lesbian or gay lovers, written at a time when an open discussion of such sexuality was not necessarily possible? Or are they sexually “innocent” romantic attachments, possible only in a world that did not acknowledge same-sex desire? According to Carolyn Oulton, although the work of sexologists of the late nineteenth century such as Havelock Ellis claimed to locate “a specifically sexual tendency in the intensity and self-sufficiency of romantic friendship” (2), writers of and commentators upon romantic friendship in the Victorian period had always been conscious of the ambivalent nature, and sexual potential, of such attachments. However, she argues that the numerous ways in which representations of romantic friendship worked within strict boundaries demonstrates a “deliberate rejection of the erotic elements, not an ignorance or even unthinking denial of erotic potential” (3). As a largely conservative phenomenon that was (mostly) safely enclosed within heteronormative values yet conscious of the need to police those aspects of it that might disrupt those values, romantic friendship, particularly between women, was, according to Oulton, “initially able to combat the ‘findings’ of sexologists at the end of the century” (3).

Oulton grounds her discussion of romantic friendship in numerous concerns of the period: the question of friendship itself, distinguished from the specific nature of “romantic” friendship; the competition between friendship and marriage; the nature of feeling in relation to gender; and the problem of enthusiasm, sensibility, and feeling in and of itself in a society that valued privacy and reserve. Focusing on a broad range of texts, from advice manuals and essays to literary works such as Dickens's David Copperfield, Gaskell's Wives and Daughters, Le Fanu's “Carmilla,” Thackeray's Vanity Fair, Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray, and lesser-known texts such as Edith Arnold's Platonics and Mary Cholmondeley's Red Pottage, Oulton convincingly charts a textual history of romantic friendship that traces the various anxieties and pressures that worked to shape it. Arguing that romantic friendship was a “cultural ideal” (44) that nevertheless had to be “carefully regulated, or at least confined within certain understood boundaries” (44), Oulton outlines certain key elements of these boundaries: distinguished by a passionate attachment to a same-sex other who inspires one to great achievements, romantic friendships were delimited by an association with childhood and its excesses and lack of restraint, by an assumption that such friendships were in part practice for and ultimately replaced by marriage, and by depictions that relied upon the death or absence of the romantic other or that negatively portrayed predatory relationships masquerading as romantic friendship as a way of distinguishing the more noble elements of romantic friendship per se.

I was both persuaded and at times unconvinced by Oulton's close analysis of romantic friendship in Victorian texts. For example, her reading of female romantic friendship in Charlotte Brontë's Shirley as a kind of training ground for heterosexual romantic love, in which “each character constantly watches and comments on the other in collusion with the aims and interests of a dominant male figure” (80), ably demonstrates the problems inherent in conflating such friendships with subversive feminine agency. Furthermore, her reading of a scene in E. M. Forster's Maurice convincingly elucidates the cultural distinctions between romantic friendship and male homosexual love. Discussing a scene in which Clive apologizes for his amorous advances upon Maurice with the comment that he misread “ordinary” friendship, Oulton argues that “even in 1913, when the book was written, ‘ordinary friendliness’ between male undergraduates at least could involve hair-stroking and a high degree of physical contact” (139). For Oulton, “This episode strongly suggests that romantic friendship was compromised from the end of the nineteenth century, not because it implied sexual feeling in itself, but because its mannerisms were difficult to distinguish from a perceived code of homosexual behaviour” (139).

However, I was not convinced that the distinction, in the Victorian period, between passionate romantic friendship and homoerotic love was as definite as Oulton attempts to construct it. Although she is careful throughout her text to acknowledge the erotic potential that writers of and about romantic friendship so carefully sought to police, she nevertheless seems, at times, too committed to elucidating the “deliberate rejection” (3) of such eroticism. While I agree with such statements as “if female friendship in particular was resistant to the attacks of sexologists, then the ideal itself must have been predicated on a fairly sophisticated understanding of what could safely be accommodated and what could not” (4), I am not persuaded that seeing romantic friendship as a precursor to homosexual love involves “conflating eroticism and passion in a way that is resisted by most nineteenth-century formulations of friendship” (145). The very fact that Clive and Maurice can use “ordinary friendliness” as a means of engaging in affections that have a potential beyond platonic love, for example, suggests that romantic friendship could be used for both conservative and subversive ends. Furthermore, Oulton's argument that, in Sheridan Le Fanu's “Carmilla,” “Laura's insistence on her friend's beauty, which recurs throughout her recollections, is deployed to suggest not an erotic temptation, but an acceptable reason for her trust in this mysterious stranger” (100) seems to me too insistent in its policing of how the text could be read and how the discourse of friendship and eroticism could circulate within it. Nevertheless, Oulton's text is fascinating, and her argument about the necessity of recognizing the conservative, heteronormative function played by romantic friendship is entirely valid. The centrality of romantic friendship to Victorian literature, and the breadth of texts represented here, makes this text a valuable addition to any library.