It began with romance and a corset.

For her 29th birthday in 2009, Gabriel Chrisman gave his wife Sarah a corset — thus beginning their lifestyle journey to try to live in another century.

They transformed themselves gradually and, six years later, the couple lives as much as possible as they would have in the 1880s and ’90s. Their house was built in 1888 in Port Townsend, Wash., across the Straits of Juan de Fuca from Victoria, B.C.

There’s a downside to the ensuing high profile, especially for her. But let’s leave that for a moment and return to that corset.

It was made of light sprung steel and covered in rose-patterned blue silk, and contrary to her expectations that wearing it would be torture, she says it was comfortable. Not only that, it improved her posture and distributed the weight of her breasts over the whole corset.

Not surprisingly, her husband loved it.

“They’re sexier. They accentuate the sexual differences between men and women,” she says, adding that in Victorian England, the waist was erotic while breasts were seen more as food for babies.

She began wearing Victorian clothes, he followed suit and, since both are interested in history, their lifestyle choices changed. They bought their house in the Victorian seaport of Port Townsend, where she can open a store’s old ledger and read the daily shopping lists of the chatelaine who once lived in her very home.

About such a momentous decision, she says simply that they love the Victorian era and “decided to live in it.”

“Whenever we can use the Victorian option we do,” she said in a telephone interview from her home. She avoided the static of incoming calls on their clunky old phone (not Victorian) to make an outgoing call to the Star.

Sometimes it’s impossible to be a purist. No editor is going to pore over handwritten manuscripts, and she’s turned her diaries into five books. So she goes digital to keep them happy.

They ride high tricycles and use oil lamps, 19th-century gas heaters and, for guests, electric light bulbs from the first patents of Tesla & Edison. She bakes her own bread from scratch and stores food in a period icebox that requires emptying the melt water.

She doesn’t miss TV sets that often provide a backdrop to 21st-century lives. “Sometimes that glowing box is even turned on when we’re sleeping,” she said, adding they prefer peace and quiet at home.

“Dealing with strangers’ reactions is the hardest thing,” she wrote in a follow-up email. On the phone she’d explained she’s sometimes heckled and screamed at in Port Townsend and attributes it to being different.

“It’s a disease in society to attack anything that’s different. That is what we have to challenge.”

Some of her opinions might be seen as controversial, though. She says for example: “Feminists have dragged us backwards further than they like to admit. . . (They don’t) see that “women have tremendous power exercised in different ways.”

She believes women used to be seen as “morally superior” and that’s being lost.

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She likes such Victorian writings as Thomas E. Hill’s advice about relationships: “Give your wife every advantage it is possible to bestow.”

Asked about positive changes in the lives of women — the vote perhaps? — she says that her “first election was in 2000 when George W. Bush got to be president (in a contested vote) and a lot of people questioned whether their voice was really being heard.”

Now she says, if only they could travel through time.