Tom Crewe’s novel, The New Life (Scribner, Jan. 3), opens with a racy scene that should come with an NSFW warning. A man is riding in an intensely crowded car on the London Underground, pressed so close to the man in front of him that he can “smell the hairs on the back of the man’s neck.” Soon the two are engaged in a surreptitious sexual act, conducted amid unsuspecting commuters, a mass of “umbrellas, canes, satchels, dresses, coats.” The scene is drawn out over four pages, full of erotic tension, and climaxes (sorry) with a surprising twist.

It’s a bravura opening to a novel that Kirkus, in a starred review, calls a “smart, sensual debut.” Those two adjectives are the magnetic poles of The New Life, a book whose subject is same-sex desire as it was lived—and understood—in late Victorian England. The novel’s protagonists are loosely based on John Addington Symonds (1840-1893) and Havelock Ellis (1859-1939), historical figures who collaborated on a book titled Sexual Inversion (as homosexuality was called) in the 1890s.

In Crewe’s hands, they become John Addington and Henry Ellis; the former, a married homosexual who meets a younger working-class man in Hyde Park and brings him home to live alongside his wife; the latter, a utopian heterosexual with a wife who embraces her own same-sex inclinations. The pair read one another’s articles and pamphlets and strike up a correspondence. Soon, they have agreed to collaborate on a book, a passionate defense of homosexuality as “normal” that is met with opprobrium when it is published—bad timing—in the immediate wake of Oscar Wilde’s scandalous 1895 trial for “gross indecency.”

Crewe, a 33-year-old associate editor at the London Review of Books, first came across mention of Symonds a decade ago while reading Richard Ellman’s celebrated biography of Wilde. “Something caught my attention about this character,” says Crewe, speaking with me recently over Zoom from his home in London. “He had an active gay sex life, but—unlike Wilde—he was really theorizing homosexuality, making these incredibly precise and passionate arguments for why it shouldn’t be a crime: It was normal. It was innocuous. It was like colorblindness.”

These two characters—and their wives—became a way for Crewe to write about queer experience in Victorian England and not be dominated by the colossus of Oscar Wilde. “I wanted to push Wilde out of the center of the story,” he says. “I wanted to talk about gay life in that period, showing how Wilde’s downfall reshaped these people’s lives, how this intellectual moment and the excitement that I discovered were torpedoed by the trial.”

Crewe has a Ph.D. in 19th-century British history from the University of Cambridge, but The New Life is no mere intellectual exercise. It’s a full-blooded novel brimming with fascinating, flawed characters and lush, descriptive writing; it’s sure to appeal to readers of Alan Hollinghurst, Colm Tóibín, and Sarah Waters. (Henry’s intelligent wife, Edith, and her spirited lover, Angelica, are among the novel’s most memorable figures.) Crewe lists his influences as Henry James, Elizabeth Bowen, Sybille Bedford, and Henry Green—“people,” he says, “who were interested in words for the sake of words, people who were interested in slightly odd sentences, unexpected images, interesting syntax.”

“I’m not one of those people who say, I can only read nonfiction when I’m writing a novel, I don’t want to contaminate my prose,” Crewe observes. “I’m the opposite: I need constant stimulation. What I like to try and do is keep a memory in my head, a sense of how a piece of prose moved me, or interested me, or surprised me. I try to keep that feeling in my head, like a bottle of perfume when the perfume is gone, but you can still smell the scent.”  

For readers, that means a luxurious reading experience that might lull them into believing they are immersed in a 19th-century novel—until a risqué scene like the one on the Tube jolts them back to reality; no Victorian novel dared to present queer characters and their sex lives as frankly. “There’s an unusual number of gay people in the book,” Crewe says. “And there’s a number of different models of gay life.”

Does Crewe feel these men and women from a bygone world will speak to readers in ours, where enormous progress has been made for LGBTQ+ rights? “I hope [the characters] would still be dissatisfied with the world now, as I hope that we are,” Crewe says. “That’s what I hope will give the book a long life, because it will always speak to something more permanent in the human condition, which is that desire for improvement, for a better world. Anyone who thinks of themselves as progressive, we’re all trying to live ahead of our time. That’s what the novel is about—being ahead of your time.”

Tom Beer is the editor-in-chief.