We know the terms in which Virginia Woolf dismissed Edwardian writers for relying exclusively on materialism. However, another take on Arnold Bennett’s specific approach to objects and interior spaces is made possible by a reappraisal of his naturalistic method. This type of Edwardian fiction reveals a political agenda buoyed up by an empirical narrative praxis. Drawing on Bennett’s The Old Wives’ Tale (1908), we show that Edwardian literary interiors turn into literary tools from which considering oneself, the others and the world out there, differently. Interiors in this novel should be read in spatial, physical, and narrative terms, since Bennett invents new modes of dwelling in order to endow his characters with new ways of narrating themselves. The Baines sisters literally and literarily are the place they inhabit, to the point of being unaware of any distinction between inside and outside. The main narrative strategy of the book is inflected by a centripetal movement that makes us move down and within various forms of interior places and narratives, in which interiority leads to unexpected intimate moments. Seeing, understanding and taming interior places so as to assert oneself narratively and intimately: such is the gist of Bennett’s democratic literary proposition. This is how his naturalism based on an empirical art of the narrative and a surprising use of interior monologue gestures towards a democratic opening of literature in which doorframes, windows and thresholds help us reconsider the aesthetic and political meanings of interiority.

Annie Besant published several autobiographical texts from 1878, starting with the preface to My Path to Atheism, when she was vice-president of the National Secular Society. Her first autobiography, Autobiographical Sketches, appeared in book form in 1885, the year she joined the Fabian Society, a decision she justified in 1886 with Why I Am a Socialist. When Besant converted to Theosophy in 1889, she wrote Why I Became a Theosophist, and her revised autobiography, Annie Besant: An Autobiography, was published in 1893, preceded by 1875 to 1891: A Fragment of Autobiography. Meanwhile, Besant penned her first biography of the Renaissance philosopher Giordano Bruno in 1876, a short sketch published in The National Reformer, the NSS weekly. She wrote a more detailed Story of Giordano Bruno, in 1884-5, at the time she joined the Socialist revival. Her fascination with Bruno took a new dimension from 1889, when she embraced the Theosophists’ belief in reincarnation: she had come to the conclusion that she had been Bruno in a past life when she lectured on Giordano Bruno: the Man and the Teacher in 1898, and delivered Le Message de Giordano Bruno au Monde moderne, in the Sorbonne in 1911. No study of Besant’s writings on Bruno has ever been published. So, this paper explores the reasons why Annie Besant wrote four biographies of Giordano Bruno between 1876 and 1911. It retraces her personal and spiritual evolution through an analysis of her biographies of Bruno as occult autobiographies, that transgress gender boundaries, and pursue the legitimization strategies developed by Besant in her openly autobiographical texts.

This article examines the conjunction of environmental aesthetics, textile materiality, and notions of the home in the work of the British poet and translator Alfred Hayes (1857–1936). Hayes, who authored six collections of poems, has been largely neglected in studies of Victorian poetry, yet his pastoral and religious verse was popular among Victorian and Edwardian readers. Hayes was also closely affiliated with the fin-de-siècle literary scene. He contributed to The Yellow Book, collaborated with Richard Le Gallienne and Norman Gale, and was reviewed by Oscar Wilde. The essay investigates the forms and functions of Hayes’s textile references and allusions to Victorian interiors in the collection The Vale of Arden and Other Poems, which was first published by John Lane at The Bodley Head in 1895. Its lyrics weave together depictions of rural England as a home with imagery inspired by the textures of luxurious fabrics and furnishing objects, thus testing the boundaries of exteriority and interiority. The article first surveys the contents, potential influences, and material design of Hayes’s little-researched book. It links Hayes’s use of poetic form and imagery to late Victorian understandings of organicism in Arts and Crafts design and home decoration. At the centre of the article will be a close reading of Hayes’s poem ‘My Study’. The poem portrays an idyllic landscape as the speaker’s study. It alludes to conceptions of the ‘house beautiful’ and the ‘book beautiful’ as it combines ecopoetic and religious notions of nature as a domestic space and as a site of learning. The article argues that textile ecologies are central to Hayes’s negotiation of relationships between nature and artifice, enabling a distinctive fusion of traditional English pastoral and fin-de-siècle aestheticism. The eco-aesthetic meditations of Hayes’s poetry highlight conceptual links between nature and notions of the dwelling space (‘oikos’), and, at the same time, suggest that material culture, specifically the fin-de-siècle craze for beautiful objects and textures, furnished Victorian nature poetry.

This article utilises a recent discovery of a textual trace of black people’s self-representation in Edwardian Britain. It concerns an autograph book, currently kept in private hands, bearing entries by black students who attended the African Institute, Colwyn Bay, in around 1905. This short text speaks to the difficulty of accessing private writings and self-representations by black people who lived in Victorian- and Edwardian-era Britain. Though there exist substantial texts written by black people in late-nineteenth-century Britain, including texts of an autobiographical type (broadly defined), self-expressive writings by black people are unquestionably rare. In retracing black lives, scholars frequently piece together information from archival and print sources. The autograph book is itself a work of fragments, though given their autobiographical character they are both rare and valuable: quotations from Shakespeare, sketches, original verse, epigrams, and quotations from scripture. These writings afford some degree of insight into the personalities of the students, who are otherwise generally represented by onlookers in the primary and secondary literature of the Institute.

L’invention puis le succès de la photographie au dix-neuvième siècle a révolutionné l’art du portrait. Dès ses débuts, elle attire de nombreux écrivains qui se font immortaliser grâce aux techniques successives du daguerréotype, de la carte-de-visite et autres procédés gagnant en praticité qui permettent bientôt à la photographie de sortir du studio professionnel pour explorer l’espace privé. En effet, alors que la photographie suscite l’enthousiasme, un intérêt grandissant pour les célébrités du monde littéraire amène les photographes à produire des images montrant les écrivains dans leur environnement habituel, voire privé. Certaines de ces images sont même destinées à une diffusion dans le grand public en étant incluses dans des publications ou commercialisées à titre d’objet de collection. Dès lors, la représentation de l’espace intérieur dans les portraits photographiques d’auteurs contribue clairement à la construction de la figure de l’écrivain en tant que personnage public et figure socioculturelle. Ce qui peut, à première vue, apparaître comme une simple toile de fond ornant le portrait d’une personne est en réalité révélateur de l’élaboration de l’identité littéraire d’un auteur à travers l’image. Certains portraits de Charles Dickens ou George Bernard Shaw, par exemple, témoignent de l’importance de la mise en scène et des accessoires dans la construction de l’image d’un écrivain, notamment lorsqu’il s’agit de représenter son intérieur comme une possible matérialisation de sa personnalité et de sa psychologie, suggérant ainsi que l’espace dans lequel évolue et crée un écrivain peut se lire comme un prolongement de son intériorité d’individu.

Relying on an unusual stitched text made by a young servant in the 1830s, this essay sets out to explore the Victorian sampler as a didactic tool designed to inculcate desirable behaviour as well as literacy and numeracy in young girls. Often viewed as repetitive exercises designed to enforce social norms of femininity, however, samplers could paradoxically prove to be spaces for girls to express their individualities and subjectivities.