An interesting read. Not a biography, but rather an attempt to situate the complex sexualities of members of the family within a 60 year span in which our framing of these shifts.

Mostly interesting, perhaps too Freudian. Struggles with AC Benson because the book was written before the paradigm of asexuality (but not aromantic) was being much talked about.

Usually I like the author inserting themselves into the text, but here it leads to passages where Goldhill seems uncomfortable expressing his line of thought but still expects us to follow it.

Academicish look at the Benson family of queer Victorian/Edwardian writers, heavy on self-defining and religion. If you're interested in the Bensons it's a useful approach, though really heavy on the fundamentally unbearable, priggish, timid Arthur at the expense of his far more interesting siblings.