"Pleasures Taken couldnt have been more aptly titled. A lusciously written study of luscious images, it invokes smell, touch, disequilibrium, the heft of labor and the weight of loss, to show how much more than spectatorial are the wrenching and stirring relations around Victorian photographs."Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, author of Fat Art, Thin Art and Tendencies "On Carrolls photographs of girls, on Camerons photographs of madonnas, on the topics of death, sex, and girlhood, Mavor has produced iconoclastic, illuminating, and consistently thoughtful readings."Henry Abelove, coeditor of The Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader "This book is a knock-your-socks-off hummer. Daring, open, and engaging, Pleasures Taken is both brilliant and warmly seductive. The book keeps us off-balance and eager for more tilts, as the author depends partly on the material and partly on her own prose to open up for us a set of stunning ideas about these photographs, about visions of women and girls, about Victorian culture, and about the ideology of our own customary viewing habits."James R. Kincaid, author of Annoying the Victorians