Cultural historian Peter Gay, who directs the Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library, is the author of about two dozen works, including his five-volume "The Bourgeois Experience: Victoria to Freud." Gay's "psychoanalytic history" is, thankfully, more history than psychoanalysis. He is a graceful writer with a silken style. Even in his Freudian moments, he never bends facts to fit preconceived formulas.

His latest book, "Schnitzler's Century," is an engagingly designed overview of the 19th-century bourgeoisie. Gay arranges his wide-ranging narrative around the life of Arthur Schnitzler (1862-1931), the Viennese playwright, novelist, short-story writer and diarist whom he sees not so much as archetypal but rather as a "creditable and resourceful witness to the middle-class world."

The unbelieving son of a Jewish physician who became a physician to please his father, Schnitzler eventually found his true vocation as a popular writer. Sexually active to a degree, he kept count of his orgasms and then totaled them up at the end of each month.

"To discover Victorian openness," Gay writes, "its measured candor, is one of the most astonishing rewards of studying middle-class culture. If 'Victorian' is a synonym for 'squeamishness' or 'prissiness,' the Victorians were not Victorians."

Or at least Arthur Schnitzler wasn't.

The book is more about Schnitzler's century than it is about Schnitzler, just as the title promises. This is just as well, because the glimpses we get show Schnitzler to be a somewhat repellent character and an abusive lover.

Around snapshots of Schnitzler's life, Gay weaves a succession of chapters on Eros, aggression, anxiety, religion and unbelief, the "gospel of work," aesthetic taste and personal privacy. Gay paints a panoramic canvas covering Western Europe and the United States and including many of the principal writers and artists of a century marked by relentless change. He has a gift for epitomizing the messages of key thinkers and explaining their relation to the social experiences of the modernizing middle classes.

The reader comes away from this sweeping book with a nuanced appreciation for the diversity among Victorians and the tumultuous mental world that they created and bequeathed to us. Gay argues that Lytton Strachey's unfortunately influential "Eminent Victorians" of 1918 "has stood in the way of discovering the truth of the Victorian middle class." The sexual life of the married Victorian bourgeoisie, Gay takes special pains to show, was not an unrelieved and frigid tundra. Both the progressive causes that marked the 20th century, and the Modernist achievements in the arts, Gay notes, were all anticipated well before World War I.

"As a historian," Gay concludes, "I hesitate to make invidious comparisons, but in view of the century that followed the 19th, I can only reiterate that the Victorian age was an admirable century, and that the bourgeoisie can take much of the credit for that."

-- Randolph Delehanty is the author of 11 books and the historian for the Presidio Trust in San Francisco.