Suffragist Artists in Partnership

Abstract

This book explores the interconnected creative partnerships of the Wattses and the De Morgans: Victorian artists, writers and suffragists. The couples were close friends and collaborators. The study demonstrates how Mary and George Watts, and Evelyn and William De Morgan worked, individually and together, to support greater gender equality and female liberation in the nineteenth century. The author traces their relationship to early and more recent feminism, reclaiming them as influential early feminists and reading their works from twentieth-century theoretical perspectives. By focusing on neglected female figures in creative partnerships, the book challenges longstanding perceptions of them as the subordinate wives of famous Victorian artists and of their marriages as representative of the traditional gender binary. This is also the first academic critical study of Mary Watts’s recently published diaries, Evelyn De Morgan’s unpublished writings, and other previously unexplored archival material by the Wattses and the De Morgans. It offers a more nuanced understanding of power relations between the sexes as well as of the relationship between feminism, literature and art in the period.