Searching the Heart: Women, Men, and Romantic Love in Nineteenth-Century America

By Karen Lystra

Book Overview

In January 1862, Charles Godwin courted Harriet Russell, ultimately unsuccessfully, with the following lines: "Like cadences of inexpressibly sweet music, your kind words came to me: causing every nerve to vibrate as though electrified by some far off strain of heavenly harmony." Almost ten years later, Albert Janin, upon receiving a letter from his beloved Violet Blair, responded with, "I kissed your letter over and over again, regardless of the small-pox epidemic at New York, and gave myself up to a carnival of bliss before breaking the envelope." And in October 1883, Dorothea Lummis wrote candidly to her husband Charles, "I like you to want me, dear, and if I were only with you, I would embrace more than the back of your neck, be sure."
In Karen Lystra's richly provocative book, Searching the Heart, we hear the voices of Charles, Albert, Dorothea, and nearly one hundred other nineteenth-century Americans emerge from their surprisingly open, intimate, and emotional love letters. While historians of nineteenth-century America have explored a host of private topics, including courtship, marriage, birth control, sexuality, and sex roles, they have consistently neglected the study of romantic love. Lystra fills this gap by describing in vivid detail what it meant to fall in love in Victorian America.
Based on a vast array of love letters, the book reveals the existence of a real openness--even playfulness--between male and female lovers which challenges and expands more traditional views of middle-class private life in Victorian America. Lystra refutes the common belief that Victorian men and women held passionlessness as an ideal in their romantic relationships. Enabling us to enter the hidden world of Victorian lovers, the letters they left behind offer genuine proof of the intensity of their most private interactions, feelings, behaviors, and judgments. Lystra discusses how Victorians anthropomorphized love letters, treating them as actual visits from their lovers, insisting on reading them in seclusion, sometimes kissing them (as Albert does with Violet's), and even taking them to bed. She also explores how courtship rituals--which included the setting and passing of tests of love--succeeded in building unique, emotional bonds between lovers, and how middle-class views of romantic love, which encouraged sharing knowledge and intimacy, gave women more power in the home.
Through the medium of love letters, Searching the Heart allows us to enter, unnoticed, the Victorian bedroom and parlor. We will leave with a different view of middle-class Victorian America.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0195058178
• ISBN13: 9780195058178
• Release Date: November 1989
• Publisher: Oxford University Press
• Length: 352 Pages
• Weight: 2.50 lbs.
• Dimensions: 9.6" x 1.3" x 6.4"

Customer Reviews

Look Into The Past

What a great historical book! Looking into diaries and letters of the Victorian Age, we see the concept of romance and love through their eyes. We get a feel for "roles." The language in these letters in so romantic and charming.

Myth Breaker

Using their own lively words, Karen Lystra recreates the life spirit of Victorians by painting flesh and blood portraits on a broad canvass. She breathes life into the long forgotten dreams and desires of men and women by resurrecting the pages their private letters and diaries. Her scholarly peek behind the euphemistic veil effectively destroys the dusty and boring myths of staid, stagnant and stuffy prudery that haunts our perspective of this vital and vibrant age. The book is a deliciously fun read, but even more important it is intelligent, combining an erudite approach to both presentation and methodology. I loved every word, was never bored, and was able to scrape the gilding off many presumptive notions. Recommend it to anyone interested in the life, times and events of the Victorian period.

A must for understanding the roots of love and sexuality!

A crucial book for anyone who wishes to understand Love, intimacy, and sexuality in nineteenth-century Victorian and modern America. Karen Lystra has closely and with great sensitivity examined hundreds of romantic love letters of courting and married middle-class American couples of the nineteenth century. When her book first appeared on the market, the belief was that Victorians were sexually repressed in public as well as in private. However, Prof. Lystra has negated the repressed Victorian stereotype and Searching the Heart has become a mainstay for anyone exploring Victorian sexuality. As a matter of fact, if this book is not at least sited in any work on Victorian men and women written after 1989, then basically the new work is dismissed and considered to be not well researched. More importantly, for the average reader, Searching the Heart offers an incredible insight into understanding the roots of the romantic love that is still extremely pervasive in 20th century. This book is a must, especially in regards to topics like: falling in love, sex-role boundaries and behavior, testing (courtship rituals), and duty bound love. The average reader will defiantly understand more about their own romantic love life after reading Searching the Heart. Lystra also titillates the modern reader with the inclusion of passages from private love letters. "Pray write often as you can," wrote one Mr. Clark to his wife, "and when you write put on our open black dress and beautiful white under dress." Or Mrs. Dorothea Lummis wrote to her husband, "I like you want me, dear, and if I were only with you, I would embrace more than the back of you neck, be sure." There are even exerts from a famous Victorian minister which proves that he was anything but a repressed man-of-the-cloth. Though it may seem that this subject matter could easily become tacky, Lystra handles each letter with dignity and respect while still using her keen analytical skills to present her very solid argument that Victorians expressed and enjoyed their sexuality more than the stereotype allows.