![]() ![]() The central body of the book is structured around its topics: interracial intercourse and its progeny, adultery, illegitimacy, mental disability and homosexuality (in fact, the subjects that novelists since the 19th century have depended upon). Deborah Cohen's excellent and illuminating book explores, in painstaking but never tedious detail, what society from the Victorians onwards kept secret, the relationship between secrecy and shame and the subtle interdependence of the secret and the private. "N othing changes more than the notion of what is shocking," wrote the novelist Elizabeth Bowen in 1959, on the eve of two decades of major disruption in the public notion of what should be kept under wraps.
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