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

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.

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 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.