Searching the Heart
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. Almostten 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, DorotheaLummis 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 Americahave 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 Victorianmen 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 howVictorians anthropomorphized love letters, treating them as actual vis
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