Sharon Marcus. Between Women: Friendship, Desire, and Marriage in Victorian England. Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 2007. Price: US$19.95.

Friendship is removed from its longstanding place on a continuum with sexual relationships: it is a distinct genre of relationship, Marcus argues, and one which helped women to find the feelings and filiations that would move them on toward marriage with men. Erotic contact between women who were just friends was acceptable: in fact, women who kissed each other in public were understood as “just friends.” Lesbians or other women engaged in sexual relationships had to observe the same decorous behaviors as heterosexual couples were required to observe in public. This erotic contact has long been misunderstood as a symptom of homosexuality, but that assumption is a case of reading the past according to the norms of the present. After reading a profoundly neglected archive of “lifewriting” by Victorian women, Marcus contends that women’s friendship was not a resistance to the smooth operations of Victorian heterosexuality, but its necessary adjunct: “[f]riendship allowed women to compete for and charm each other, to develop their intellectual and aesthetic tastes, to augment their worldly ties, and to deepen their spiritual ones” (72). More directly, more literally, women seemed to have talked each other into the “delights” of marriage: Anna Forbes Laurie, for example, helped her friend Ann Taylor Gilbert to accept a proposal after which Gilbert writes to Laurie, “’I am learning with tolerable facility to believe what you told me when you said ‘oh, this delightful, mutual love’’” (72). Moving from lifewriting to the novel, Marcus theorizes what she calls “the plot of female amity”: a narrative in which a friendship between women results in marriage between a woman and a man. In Middlemarch, Far From the Madding Crowd, David Copperfield, Aurora Leigh, and Shirley female friendship is the condition that allows a heroine to struggle toward and finally accomplish a “companionate marriage.” Charlotte Brontë rejects the “self-sustaining economy” of female amity in Villette, making the novel peculiarly—and disturbingly--modern. Villette “left its Victorian audience nonplussed” Marcus writes, because the novel’s relations among women were so strangely rivalrous and bitter. Victorian women’s friendship seems based on a solidarity and loyalty that we think of as having gotten stronger in the twentieth century, but which has perhaps actually vitiated over time—as has friendship itself, as Between Women implicitly suggests. Part Two, “Mobile Objects: Female Desire” takes us into largely uncharted erotic territory: bondage and flogging fantasies as elaborated in the fashion magazine, and sadomasochism in relationships among dolls and their owners. In her readings of these object relations, Marcus credits women with all the aggression and hatred that has been withheld in kinder and gentler histories of friendship and love among us. In children’s tales narrated by dolls, Marcus reads the possibility of both inflicting violence and performing “magical reparations.” Fashion plates enact, almost literally in Marcus’s reading of hands in laps, masturbation, and, more shockingly, women flagellating other women. Marcus allows women a full measure of humanity in her unflinching readings of these little-read texts, and finds another site where relations between women might provide the (very literal) stimulus for similar relations, with different objects, later in life. Marcus historicizes same-sex marriage, taking some of the steam out of recent arguments for and against gay and lesbian marriage: it is certainly not a new issue born of radical social change, as both sides are given to claiming. Female marriage was brought up as a specimen of marriage as contract during debates about divorce law in the mid-nineteenth century. And it was accepted, at least among the literate middle-class writers Marcus reads, so long as it was “respectable,” that …