Review Summaries

• Its exacting historical recreation and its willingness to face desire and shame directly are widely praised. At the same time, some readers find the dense style and strong intellectual focus challenging.

Reviews

• Certainly a well-written book, no question. Especially for younger readers. But I don't understand why it was so highly praised in the NY-Times.

• Stelar novel, well researched and deeply reflective engaging storey. Quite a fascinating insight of the psyche of people who needed to conform in a culture where they had no other choice to survive.

• This book will be noticed for its unselfconscious depiction of sexual acts between men, but I also admire it as an example of how history can be melded into create great fiction without disrespecting the documented facts. Crewe’s main characters, John Addington and Henry Ellis, play the parts of the real Addington Symonds and Havelock Ellis, authors of the first academic treatise on homosexuality. These two men never actually met: that their counterparts meet in this book is a hurrah for the ‘what-ifs’ of historical fiction. Because my own research I know a little of Symonds, who met R.L.Stevenson at Davos in the early 1880s and in The New Life I found Addington the more rounded and convincing figure, a Victorian scholar forced to deny his inclinations and enter into a conventional but strained marriage. At the time, there were only three views of homosexuality: romanticised Greek Love, a medical condition or criminal immorality. His wish was to have it accepted as entirely natural and for homosexuals to live together openly and without fear. He doesn’t come across as a particularly attractive character but he is compelling in his need to be heard after years of silence. Ellis is more of an enigma. Originally a doctor who has turned to social causes, he is painfully shy and by the end of the book I found myself asking why he had entered into the project to write a book with Addington. He considers himself socially progressive and has homosexual friends but except in one small aspect is oddly asexual. He marries the campaigning Edith apparently as an act of rebellion but neither of the has fully considered what they are getting into. The marriage remains unconsummated and Edith eventually lives with close friend Angelica as her wife. There is a strong suggestion of an attraction between Ellis and Angelica and the ending is ambiguous as to how or where they will all end up. It’s arguable that the female characters in this book could be given voices – or perhaps that’s a novel still to be written! This book is certainly as much about marriage and male/female relationships as about homosexuality and I found Addington’s final showdown with his wife and his damaged relationship with his children quite heart-breaking. For a historical novel this is a book of great style and striking modernity and for anyone wanting an insight into the sexual and social milieu of late Victorian England it’s not only a great read but more illuminating IMO than any academic article or treatise.

• A very well written life about life as a gay person in the 19th century and reform that tried to take place Beautifully written and so descriptive it was like beingthere

• A marvelous sensitive novel, full of insights and beautifully written historical and social facts, as striking as Forster's or Galgut's novels.

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