the eye in the door

☥ victorian age ✧ ww1 ✧ regeneration trilogy ✧ lawrence of arabia ✧ 1917 ✧ mlm ✧ german expressionism ☥ ig: @viktorianskt

[veryvictorian]

Gay Victorian Book List

Hey there! I'm making this collaborative list of novels set in Victorian Age that have some sort of gay, m/m representation. Edwardian Age is fine as well. Please, do leave your recommendations in the comments below, I'd be happy to add them!

I'll mark with an asterisk (*) the books I have read myself.

Written in 19th century

The Sins of the Cities of the Plain, by Jack Saul (1881)*

The Picture of Dorian Gray, Oscar Wilde (1890)*

The Green Carnation, by Robert Smythe Hichens (1894)

A Marriage Below Zero, by Alan Dale (1889)

Fridolins heimliche Ehe (Fridolin's Mystical Marriage), by Adolf Wilbrandt (1875)

Written in 20th century

Maurice, by E.M. Forster (1914)*

Imre: A Memorandum, by Edward Prime-Stevenson (1906)

Desire and Pursuit of the Whole, by Frederick Rolfe (1904)

The Prussian Officer, by D. H. Lawrence (1914)

The Garden God: A Tale of Two Boys, by Forrest Reid (1905)

The Immoralist, by André Gide (1902)

Tonio Kröger, by Thomas Mann (1903)

Death in Venice, by Thomas Mann (1912)*

Contemporary

The New Life, by Tom Crewe (2023)

The Invention of Love, by Tom Stoppard (1997)*

An Unseen Attraction, by K.J. Charles (2017). Trilogy.

The Prince of Mirrors, by Alan Robert Clark (2018)

[nick--knack]

accidentally typed "trench kiss" instead of "french kiss". anyone wanna hold hands and kiss in a muddy hole full of rats as bullets and grenades and artillerary shells fly over our heads?

[adyaqq]

blakefield the things u do to me💔💔

anyway does anyone have any fanfic recommendations. I'm pretty sure I've read all of them at this point help

[hey-sherry]

it's been a while

[jovienna]

some messy annotations in my copy.

[inesk-art]

A kiss in an alley OR What if we kissed beneath the overly romanticized portrait of myself? The more I read about TE, the more I become interested in his life after the war. I dearly love The Mint and all the little bits of information about him and his tank corps/air force friends. Inspirations: That one photo of him, another photo of him, the painting of Augustus John and a little bit Leyendecker.

[anticbrvtalist]

Nicola Samorì, Untitled, 2025

At Nicodim gallery, NY.

[idyllisk]

“Do not unsheath me without reason. Do not wield me without valor.”

inscription on the sword of a Giovanni della Bande Nere statue on the facade of the Uffizi Gallery, Florence, Italy.

[veryvictorian]

Goth girl leaving a flower on Swedish actor Victor Sjöström's grave.

Credits: veryvictorian (tumblr/tiktok) / viktorianskt (ig)

[a-silly-poll-side-blog-yay]

you teleported to your main special interest! will you survive?

yes

no

results

Voting ended onAug 20, 2025

[veryvictorian]

to the cleveland street scandal, let's go beat up some pedo!!

[sweetbirdofparadox]

'T. E. L.' by Siegfried Sassoon

Source

The illustrated draft of the poem written by Siegfried in memory of his friend T.E. Lawrence shortly after his death in 1935! Tumblr messed up the quality a bit.

Even before Lawrence’s actual death five days later Sassoon had received a ghoulish request from the Observer for a ‘personal appreciation … in the unfortunate event of the accident proving fatal’. Though he indignantly refused to oblige, he did write a poem about Lawrence a week after his death, which he sent to Marsh for The Times. Marsh rejected it, ostensibly as a ‘technical indiscretion’, but more probably because of its rather startling contents. Addressed directly to Lawrence, it was, in effect, a claim that Lawrence had appeared to him after his death. Lawrence had already impressed Sassoon directly with his ‘extraordinary powers’ in the autumn of 1933, when he had performed an ‘act of healing’ on Sassoon, who had been in danger of losing the sight in one eye after a bout of shingles. His ‘visitation’ after death completed the process and was a significant factor in the poet’s developing spirituality, the ‘closest [he] had ever come to religion’, he told Tomlinson.

Siegfried Sassoon: Soldier, Poet, Lover, Friend (2014) by Jean Moorcroft Wilson

I tried to find a completed version of this but had no luck, so I attempted to transcribe it by deciphering Sassoon's calligraphy here... With evidently poor results.

If you are more adept at reading calligraphy your corrections will be welcome. Here's what I got so far:

I watch your face of nineteen-thirty-five By luminous degrees grow less alive: I see those eyes, once filled with urgent thought, Stilled to unseeing myth; from less to less I watch the light withdrawn from features wrought Into the calm of cold forgetfulness. Your face became this legend mask of stone, And* searched into our hearts, and by some power of life on life, lit fires which flamed and threw Shadows of mightier shapes than we had known On walls that were the world and in that hour We were made by you half-magnificent. I saw your face carved, silent and serene And lightness was my heart where once you had been

Edit: @nerdyhistoryenjoyer & @blitzschnitz have offered some improvements on the transcription, which I've modified accordingly.

*that godforsaken squiggle still doesn't look like an 'and' to me but it also doesn't look like anything else.

[veryvictorian]

Follow my tiktok @/viktorianskt for more! I'm studying to become an English lit teacher and this is a great exercise :)

[dailyclassicart]

Carl Holsøe - "Sunshine in the living room"

[veryvictorian]

tiktok: viktorianskt

[anyskin]

Brigitte Helm on the set of the movie Metropolis 1927

[alovelywaytospendanevening]

Mattachine Review (May 1960): "Schoolboy Homosexuality"

[julian-fawcett-mp]

I was reading an article on Siegfried Sassoon and