Christina Liddell, the Forgotten Fraser Tytler Sister: Censorship and Suppression in Mary Watts’s Life Writing

Abstract

Novelist, short story writer and poet Christina Liddell (nee Fraser Tytler) (1848–1927) is one of the many neglected non-canonical women writers of the nineteenth century. Despite her fame during her day and her familial and professional connections to Victorian celebrities, including Julia Margaret Cameron, she is now relatively unknown and no study of her currently exists. She is herself a silence in the archive. It was Christina who introduced her artistic younger sister Mary to ‘England’s Michelangelo’ George Frederic Watts, facilitating and remaining at the heart of one of Victorian Britain’s most famous conjugal creative partnerships. Indeed, George called for Christina on his deathbed, and she is now buried beside the couple. This article explores their unconventional triangular relationship and analyses evidence of their eroticized interfamilial creative partnership, which reconfigured hegemonic family structures and represented a progressive if not radical approach to gender and marital politics. Through a reading of Mary’s private diaries alongside her published biography or quasi-hagiography of her husband, this article investigates censorship, suppression, and silence in the form of textual subtexts, ambiguous intimacy, dying words and hallucinations, secret parentage, missing diary pages, and posthumous interventions. It addresses omissions in auto/biography and in the archive, bringing previously unseen material to light and illuminating institutional silence. Combining literary, art historical, and theoretical perspectives, it analyses neglected diaries, auto/biography, and letters alongside poetry, paintings, and photographs in order to offer insight into the untold complexities of Victorian familial relationships and sexualities. This article uses Victorian women’s life writing to explore the complex interconnections of married couples, adult sisters, and siblings-in-law, offering a broader understanding of filial bonds, conjugal arrangements, and eroticized relationships in the long nineteenth century.