Women and British aestheticism

Abstract

Women and British Aestheticism. Edited by Talia Schaffer and Kathy Alexis Psomiades. Charlottesville and London: University Press of Virginia. 2000. ix + 304 pp. $68.50 (paperbound $19.50). This timely and ably edited collection makes a welcome contribution to reconsideration of British aestheticism and the Victorian fin de siecle. In their useful introduction Talia Schaffer and Kathy Alexis Psomiades explain how recent scholarship has begun to recover women's part in the literary and cultural movements of the later nineteenth century and challenge the still prevalent assumption that there were no significant literary works produced by women during this period. While the `New Women' writers have already experienced something of a renaissance, Schaffer and Psomiades are anxious to show that these writers represent only one specific type of women's writing and that other women writers with more pronounced aesthetic interests were also important. The fourteen essays in this collection split into four groups: fin-de-siecle women's fiction, aesthetic poetry, non-fictional aesthetic prose, and the influence of aestheticism on modernism. Within this a wide range of authors is covered ranging from little-known figures such as Lucas Malet (Mary St Leger Kingsley Harrison) Graham R. Tomson (Rosamund Marriott Watson), and Netta Syrett, the well-known but little-read Marie Corelli, and the canonically important Christina Rossetti and Virginia Woolf. Topics tackled include the complex relations between male and female aesthetes of the period, degeneration, suburbia, `Eastern' exoticism, garden writing, and aesthetic colour pigments. Of the fourteen contributors two are men and all are American. This insularity seems somewhat surprising in view of the subject matter and the fact that there are some important British scholars working in this period. It also seems misjudged to have included Regenia Gagnier's essay on aesthetic epistemologies of which large portions had already appeared in the very recent collection Victorian Sexual Dissidence edited by Richard Dellamora (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1999). That said, most of the contributions in this collection are of a high standard and play a valuable role in introducing the reader to many neglected, often fascinating works. A good example of this work of recovery is Talia Schaffer's essay on Lucas Malet's The History of Richard Calmady (1901), `the female aesthetic version of the monster narrative' (p. 59), in which the physically deformed hero is redeemed rather than rejected. Margaret Debelius contributes an interesting piece on Ada Leverson, Oscar Wilde's `Sphinx'. In Leverson's amusing parodies of Wilde, Debelius sees her as defining herself as `sympathetic to aspects of aestheticism while still critiquing its codes' (p. 193). Edward Marx provides a thoughtful and well-researched assessment of decadent exoticism in the work of the Indian poet Sarojini Naidu, who was lionized by the male London literary establishment in the 1890s, juxtaposing her with Laurence Hope (Adela Nicolson), an English poet in India and author of the famous song `Pale hands I loved beside the Shalimar'. …