I think an unfortunate effect of Foucault’s work, as it was absorbed by academia, was that it made historians reluctant to call people or sexual acts in the past ‘homosexual’ or ‘gay’ since these terms ‘did not exist at the time’ or were recent creations. It’s a long time since we’ve had anything to do with each other and we were never that close to begin with, so all I will say is that it’s not obvious that the ‘invention’ of the ‘homosexual’ should inevitably have had repressive or controlling effects, especially since, in the case of John Addington Symonds, Havelock Ellis and Edward Carpenter, they saw this discursive move as emancipatory, a precondition of homosexuality’s legalisation and social acceptance, as well as a prelude to a more general reconsideration of sex and its significance for human happiness.

So: how useful is Foucault for thinking about Victorian sexuality? How do you as a historian characterise the Victorian sexual psyche? But in other ways, the novel is also about sexual repression – state repression, the repression of heterosexual marriage, and the quieter repressions of internalised gay self-loathing. In some ways, your novel is consonant with Foucault’s rejection of the repressive hypothesis: its central characters are preoccupied with finding better, scientifically-grounded accounts of human sexuality, especially homosexuality – or ‘inversion’, as they call it – and strive to understand (and liberate) themselves in relation to those scientific accounts. These discourses did not repress sexuality so much, Foucault says, as produce it. In fact, Foucault says, the 19th century teemed with various discourses about sex, especially scientific and legal discourses that sought to understand (and thus control) marginalised or ‘perverted’ sexualities, including homosexuality. But when I think about sex and sexuality in the Victorian period – the broad historical backdrop of The New Life – I can’t help thinking of Foucault’s The History of Sexuality, and in particular his rejection of the “repressive hypothesis”, according to which human sexuality and discussions of it were repressed in the Victorian era. Amia Srinivasan: You’re a 19th-century British historian by training, so you’ll have to forgive me for starting with Foucault.

The new life tom crewe review