Not just a Pretty Face: Women’s Heroic Experience in The Heroides, Book Illustration & Mural Painting in Britain, 1700–1720

Abstract

ABSTRACT This essay examines a particular transmedial moment in the early eighteenth century which promoted the agency of women as heroines at the heart of classical narratives. Opening with a case study of Aphra Behn’s contribution and evolving place within John Dryden’s influential edition of Ovid’s Heroides, I show how later illustrative engravings came to prioritise, and productively extend, Behn’s impetus and model for female experience, one which was initially sidelined in the volume. This provides a model for thinking about the wider artistic sources available to us in understanding ways in which women took increased control and influence over their representation in art, chiefly as elite patrons, curators and subjects. In this analysis, the decade of the 1710s comes into particular focus as a time when women demonstrated and communicated creative agency inspired by the courtly culture of Queen Anne. Despite the dearth of easel paintings at this time representing classical and historical themes, engraving and mural painting were their key vehicles and, through the latter form especially, women wrought influence using classical narratives as conduits for communicating their agency as heroines at the centre of their own narratives.