Stimulating in its details as well as the overarching claim, Timothy Carens’s Strange Gods: Love and Idolatry in the Victorian Novel is one of those rare studies that is convincing precisely because it seems, only in retrospect, obvious—as if we must have, or certainly should have, already known this. It is a significant intervention in our understanding of the representation of Victorian romantic love, and how various mid- to late nineteenth-century marriage plots were impacted by—even derailed by—characters who were anxious about potential “idolatry”: about loving someone more than one’s Creator. What Strange Gods does—elegantly, persuasively, and with sympathy toward its subject—is remind us of the deep religiosity of Victorian culture, and how in recovering the importance of religion to the period, we may need to adjust our sense of cultural discourses that seem firmly within the realm of the secular. Strange Gods demonstrates that the Victorians worried that love...
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