There’s probably no single time or place in human history that symbolizes sexual repression more than Victorian England. It was the age of respectability, manners, and wearing entirely too many layers of clothing. Of course, this image of aristocratic propriety and buttoned-up prudishness was mainly an upper-class affair — we associate it with that era mostly because nearly everything we know from the written record was penned by folks from high society. But the truth is, even within the aristocracy, things were not as chaste — or straight — as we’ve been given to imagine. Simmering beneath the surface of demure decorum and all those petticoats, Victorian England was bursting at the seams with bi energy.
For starters, the Victorian period produced quite a number of eminent bi people. John Addington Symonds was a noted essayist, literary critic, and cultural historian who married and fathered four daughters while also having relationships with men and writing in defense of same-sex love. Katherine Bradley and Edith Cooper were lovers who wrote poetry together under the pen name Michael Field, though both also had attractions to men. Isadora Duncan, known as the “mother of modern dance”, was openly bi in an era before the popular language for sexual orientation even existed. Amusingly, even the wife of the Archbishop of Canterbury, Minnie Benson, had multiple bi relationships with other women. Perhaps most memorably, Oscar Wilde’s same-sex escapades became the subject of international scandal, a public trial, and ultimately imprisonment.
The period is also bookended by a number of celebrated bi figures, such as Frankenstein (1818) author Mary Shelley and feminist writer Virginia Woolf, who each lived a portion of their lives during the Victorian era but are not considered to be of the era.
We can also see the bi undercurrent of the time in Victorian literature. From Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847) to Alfred Tennyson’s In Memoriam A.H.H. (1850), to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes novels and Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890), we see a rich tapestry of characters, themes, and symbols that lean into sexual fluidity or ambiguity. Remember that this was not an era in which same-sex desire could be spelled out in print. And the most bi-coded subgenre in all of fiction — vampire stories — took particular shape during the Victorian period, most notably with Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu’s 1872 Carmilla, which was among the first of its kind to infuse vampirism with overt bisexual undertones. But fiction and poetry weren’t the only forms of bi writing.
Victorian England came at the peak of the letter-writing age, and as the English literary scholar Sharon Marcus documented in her influential 2007 book Between Women: Friendship, Desire, and Marriage in Victorian England, the correspondence between Victorian women paints a picture of passionately bi female relationships that were surprisingly visible and accepted. And these relationships often coexisted alongside happy opposite-sex marriages.
Similarly, while Victorian laws were deeply homophobic and bigoted, there were small victories and large loopholes. In 1861, for example, the UK abolished the death penalty for sodomy, and though same-sex behavior was criminal for men, the law was indifferent toward bi and lesbian women. As the Molly Brown House Museum notes, in Victorian England, “Lesbian and bisexual acts of women were fairly common and they were not illegal.”
What often confuses people about the Victorian era is that today we tend to think of sexuality in strict categories — “gay or straight” — based on identity, while back then it was more about who you were attracted to, not the label you used. It should come as no surprise that few Victorians identified as bi, for instance, as the term was not coined until 1892, and was not commonly used until around the 1960s. Victorian England was an era before mainstream sexual orientation labels, and in a way, this allowed people to divorce their attractions and sexual behavior from their identity.
In a 2017 essay in The Atlantic, historian Deborah Cohen shed some light on the ways in which sexuality was thought of in Victorian times — or rather, the ways in which it wasn’t thought of:
As a great deal of queer history has by now demonstrated, the strictly defined categories of ‘homosexual’ and ‘heterosexual’ are relatively new: bright lines drawn across the late-20th-century sexual landscape that made ‘coming out’ a dichotomous choice.
For the Victorians, the situation was much more fluid. A woman’s romantic interest in another woman could be seen as excellent preparation for marriage. Though sex between men was a criminal offense […] there was, as yet, hardly a homosexual identity […] Until the early 1950s, a man could have sex with another man without thinking himself in any respect ‘abnormal’ — as long as he steered clear of the feminine dress or behavior that marked a so-called pouf or queen.
Victorian England was far from the golden age of sex, but neither was it the sexual straitjacket it’s remembered to have been. It turns out, there are no codes of propriety, no social norms, no laws of men or religious dictates that can ever truly suppress the vibrant sexuality that thrums within the human spirit.