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A Very Queer Family Indeed: Sex, Religion, and the Bensons in Victorian Britain. By Simon Goldhill. (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2016, Pp. 344. $35.00, cloth.)
It is not often that page turner accurately describes academic histories of Victorian grandees. But, unlike most monographs, Simon Goldhill's, A Very Queer Family Indeed, begins with a kiss. The kiss in question occurs between a then twelve-year-old Minnie Sidgwick and twenty-three-year-old Edward White Benson after Benson had proposed marriage. The subsequent marriage laid the foundation of what Goldhill calls a "very queer family indeed." Despite achieving high positions in late-Victorian and Edwardian institutional life, the Bensons remained in, but not of, conventional life. This liminal position enables Goldhill to trace developments in writing, understandings of sexuality, and religion between 1840 and 1940 rather than produce a typical family history.
Goldhill knows so much about the Bensons because they suffered from an acute case...