19th-Century Men and Women: Romantic and Familial Bonds

While men and women occupied separate spheres in the early and middle decades of the nineteenth century, those spheres overlapped in important ways. The heterosocial preoccupations of schoolteacher and diarist Francis Paine and the romantic correspondence of Emma Hart Seymour and Philip Battell offer two illustrations of men’s and women’s fascination with each other. Paine’s appreciation for the physical charms of his female students, as well as his close relationships with female family members, are documented in his diary of the 1840s. Seymour and Battell’s intimate correspondence, in which they communicated mutual devotion but also anxiety, reflects the value nineteenth-century men and women placed on romantic love and affectionate companionship.


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