Review: Catherine Maxwell, Scents and Sensibility: Perfume in Victorian Literary Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017)

Abstract

As the author of two other monographs involving the Victorian sensory imagination, The Female Sublime from Milton to Swinburne: Bearing Blindness (Manchester University Press, 2001) and Second Sight: The Visionary Imagination in Late Victorian Literature (Manchester University Press, 2008), Catherine Maxwell brings her vast historical knowledge of literary figures of the Victorian period to her latest study, Scents and Sensibility: Perfume in Victorian Literary Culture.

Scents and Sensibility is a work of literary history peppered with analysis of scent-related texts. Maxwell reads many of these texts as demonstrating a given author’s idiosyncratic tastes but also as revealing deeper connections to cultural mores and metaphors. These connections, in turn, blossom into fuller readings of the texts themselves as we better understand them in their cultural contexts. The main organizing principle of this study, therefore, is a focus on the authors, whom Maxwell identifies as olfactifs, those particularly sensitive to odours as an indicator of their Decadent aesthetic credentials.