SOURCE: "'Love in a Life': The Case of Nietzsche and Lou Salomé," in The Victorian Newsletter, No. 67, Spring 1985, pp. 14-17.

In the following essay, Warner speculates that the idealistic "holy trinity" formed between Andreas-Salomé Friedrich Nietzsche, and Paul Rée was fraught with sexual tension and conflicting intentions from the outset, leading to an emotional rupture which significantly altered the course of Nietzsche's philosophy.

In reading the lives and writing of the men and women of the Victorian period, I think we have been too ready to divine that society into those Victorians whose idea of love carries the purity of its idealism to an abstract and impossible extreme, and those "Other Victorians" who simply reduce love to forbidden sex. The first group appear as great believers in the most metaphysically-charged versions of love, the second as the failed idealists-becomeskeptics, who leave the marriage bed for adultery or...