The modern idea of Victorians is that they were emotionless prudes, imprisoned by sexual repression and suffocating social constraints; they expressed love and affection only within the bounds of matrimony—if at all. And yet, a wealth of evidence contradicting this idea has been hiding in plain sight for close to a century. In Manly Love, Axel Nissen turns to the novels and short stories of Victorian America to uncover the widely overlooked phenomenon of passionate friendships between men.

Nissen’s examination of the literature of the period brings to light a forgotten genre: the fiction of romantic friendship. Delving into works by Mark Twain, Henry James, William Dean Howells, and others, Nissen identifies the genre’s unique features and explores the connections between romantic friendships in literature and in real life. Situating love between men at the heart of Victorian culture, Nissen radically alters our understanding of the American literary canon. And with its deep insights into the emotional and intellectual life of the period, Manly Love also offers a fresh perspective on nineteenth-century America’s attitudes toward love, friendship, marriage, and sex.

“This is the most interesting and original study of nineteenth-century American literature and culture that I have read in years. In the wake of Manly Love, the field will never look quite the same. Nissen has trumped nearly every other scholar in recapturing and elucidating some fundamental patterns of American Victorian culture. His engaging, even suspenseful, book transported me into those times more fully than anything I know from outside the period itself, such that his insights attain an emotional as well as intellectual force. This book deserves a sustained standing ovation.”

“Manly Love uncovers amazing examples of male romantic friendship in literary classics as well as in hitherto lost literary gems. It is the first comprehensive history of love between men as it was reflected in nineteenth-century American fiction. Axel Nissen engagingly and definitively challenges the historical amnesia which assumes that the transatlantic uproar over the Oscar Wilde case represented the whole story of the American Victorian response to male homoeroticism.”