The Naked Heart

At the very time that industrialists, inventors, statesmen, and natural scientists were conquering new objective worlds, Gay writes, "the secret life of the self had grown into a favorite and wholly serious indoor sport."

Following the middle class's preoccupation with inwardness through its varied cultural expressions (such as fiction, art, history, and autobiography), Gay turns also to the letters and confessional diaries of both obscure and prominent men and women. These revealing documents help to round out a sparkling portrait of an age.

Volume IV of the Bourgeois Experience: Victoria to Freud, a five volume history of the nineteenth century, focusing on the lives, institutions, attitudes, tastes, goals and passions of the West's middle classes. This book details the inner life of the period and the quest for inwardness which personified this age.