An exemplary Victorian family, or so it seems. But let us borrow one of Charles Dickens’s favorite literary devices and pull the roof off the Benson home to take a peek inside. It is 1853. Edward is 23 years old, handsome, determined, and already embarked on a promising career. Perched on his knee is his cousin Minnie, a pleasingly childish 12-year-old. Edward has just kissed Minnie to seal their engagement. Wait 40-odd years, lift the roof again, and we find grown-up Minnie tucked in her marital bed with Lucy Tait, the daughter of the previous archbishop, who has been living with the Bensons at Edward’s invitation. At the Sussex home where Minnie and Lucy moved three years after Edward’s death, they were joined by Minnie’s daughter Margaret, the Egyptologist, cohabiting with her intimate lady friend. As for the Benson boys, well, none of the three married, and contemporaries in the know had a pretty good understanding of their romantic feelings for men, in all likelihood never acted upon. The Bensons were, as Simon Goldhill writes in his subtle, smart book, a very queer family indeed.

Wresting the Victorians from the prison of dour, prudish stereotypes to which their children and grandchildren consigned them is a project that has occupied scholars for more than a few decades now. Goldhill, a professor at Cambridge, has produced an insightful contribution to that effort. But even more resonant for our own times of sexual and gender heterodoxy—when ambiguity is the new frontier—is what the Bensons can tell us about the prehistory. As a great deal of queer history has by now demonstrated, the strictly defined categories of “homosexual” and “heterosexual” are relatively new: bright lines drawn across the late-20th-century sexual landscape that made “coming out” a dichotomous choice.

For the Victorians, the situation was much more fluid. A woman’s romantic interest in another woman could be seen as excellent preparation for marriage. Though sex between men was a criminal offense (in Britain, lesbianism was invisible before the law), there was, as yet, hardly a homosexual identity defined by same-sex desire. Until the early 1950s, a man could have sex with another man without thinking himself in any respect “abnormal”—as long as he steered clear of the feminine dress or behavior that marked a so-called pouf or queen. To pry off the Benson roof is to ask the question: What was it like to live before and during the invention of modern sexuality?

Of all the doings in the Benson household, the most discomfiting to our own sensibilities is Edward’s romance with Minnie. She was just 11 when Edward decided to make her his wife, though at her mother’s insistence, he agreed to delay the wedding until Minnie turned 18. In opting for a child bride, Edward was calculating as well as passionate: It would be a few years before he had enough money to marry, and here was an opportunity to mold his future wife to suit his own pious requirements. For her part, Minnie was girlishly eager to please.