Victorian Women Writers Research Articles

Book Review Forum

Book Review Forum Andrea Broomfield (bio) and Solveig C. Robinson (bio), Forum Editors At the 2009 RSVP Annual Conference in Minneapolis, amid general discussion about book reviews in Victorian Periodicals Review, the idea was floated to create a forum in which contemporary or classic works of periodicals scholarship could be discussed by scholars from different disciplinary or theoretical perspectives. This inaugural VPRBook Review Forum focuses on Dallas Liddle's The Dynamics of Genre(Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2009). Historian Leslie Howsam and literary critic Linda K. Hughes offer their insights into what Liddle's book offers scholars in their disciplines. We hope their comments—and Liddle's responses—will provide food for thought. Andrea Broomfield, Forum Editors Johnson County Community College Solveig C. Robinson, Forum Editors Pacific Lutheran University Andrea Broomfield Andrea Broomfield is Professor of English at Johnson County Community College, Overland Park, KS. She specializes in culinary history and is author of Food and Cooking in Victorian England: A History(2007). She is currently writing a history of dining aboard the steamship, 1840-1914. Her most recent work includes an article in Gastronomica, "The Night the Good Ship Went Down: Three Meals aboard the Titanic" (2009) and "Food and Cooking in Scotland" for Food Cultures of the World(2011). She is co-editor with Sally Mitchell of Prose By Victorian Women: An Anthology(1996) and has written several article and book chapters on Victorian-era journalism. Solveig C. Robinson Solveig Robinson is Associate Professor of English and Director of the Publishing & Printing Arts Program at Pacific Lutheran University in Tacoma, WA. She is the author of a number of articles on Victorian publishing history and the editor of A Serious Occupation: Literary Criticism by Victorian Women Writers(2003). Copyright © 2011 The Research Society for Victorian Periodicals

Review: Victorian Women Writers and the Classics: The Feminine of Homer, by Isobel Hurst

Review: <i>Victorian Women Writers and the Classics: The Feminine of Homer</i>, by Isobel Hurst

&lt;em&gt;Women Writers and Nineteenth-Century Medievalism&lt;/em&gt;, by Clare Broome Saunders

Reviewed by: Women Writers and Nineteenth-Century Medievalism Richard Cronin (bio) Women Writers and Nineteenth-Century Medievalism, by Clare Broome Saunders; pp. xiii + 230. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009, £45.00, $79.95. Clare Broome Saunders, in the first book-length study of Victorian women writers and medievalism, argues that the medieval trappings allowed “the forbidden to be said without censure” (8). Saunders perhaps overstates the case when she suggests that almost any contribution to public debate by a woman was regarded as an act of trespass. Susannah Dobson, for example, may well have introduced into her translations from [End Page 138] the French troubadours a “critique of the Catholic Church” (21), but it is hard to believe that in 1779, and for the century thereafter, such a critique, even by a woman, would not have been widely welcomed even if it had been published undisguised. Saunders rightly focuses on more controversial public interventions: for women writers medievalism was, she claims, a “useful screen for subversion” (27). Again, however, the claim needs to be modified. In a fascinatingly wide-ranging chapter on representations of Joan of Arc in the period she describes Joan’s “role as active martial woman” as “exploding all aspects of chivalry” (102), but active martial women are prominent in the chivalric epic from its outset. One thinks of Torquato Tasso’s Clorinda, Ludovico Ariosto’s Bradamante, and Edmund Spenser’s Britomart, or, even further back, Virgil’s Camilla. A woman in arms secures rather than threatens the chivalric code provided that the phenomenon is presented as anomalous. In an absorbing chapter on “War, Medievalism, and the Woman Writer,” Felicia Hemans and Laetitia Landon are represented similarly as smuggling anti-war sentiment into work designed to secure “commercial success” by disguising it in medieval garb (42). A male reviewer of Landon’s in the Westminster Review complained that her poetry confirmed gender stereotypes: “In fact,” Saunders replies, “Landon’s objective is to highlight” the unequal treatment of the sexes (50). What kind of a fact is this, however, if Landon is anxious to safeguard her commercial success by veiling her view of the matter from her more conservative readers? Can medievalism really allow Hemans at once to “tap into public feeling to increase financial success” (42), and to bring to the attention of a thoughtlessly patriotic readership the human cost of military glory? It may be, of course, that Hemans and Landon succeed in addressing two different readerships simultaneously. Saunders recalls how Elizabeth Barrett Browning chose the title Sonnets from the Portuguese (1850) so that the public might take as translations poems that her husband would understand quite differently, “the Portuguese” being his nickname for her. It is almost certainly true that such subterfuges were a more important resource for women writers in the nineteenth century than for their male counterparts, but again the issue is complicated: Barrett Browning would have known very well that one of the distinguishing characteristics of the sonnet sequence is the simultaneous address to an intimate private circle and to a public readership. The double meaning of her title is a device by which she at once acknowledges the difficulty of appropriating a male form and demands her place within the tradition, alongside Dante and Petrarch and Sidney and Shakespeare. The virtues of Saunders’s book are less apparent in its thesis (I am not sure that she ever quite succeeds in defining a type of Victorian medievalism peculiar to women writers) than in the rich variety of the material that she uncovers. Her enthusiasms are always pushing against the boundaries of her chosen theme. So, in her chapter on “Romance, Gender, and the Crimean,” she overflows into a more general account of women’s responses to the war than could have been expected. Saunders offers us a fine sketch of Florence Nightingale and her nurses and of Barrett Browning’s splendidly acidic response: “Every man is on his knees before ladies carrying lint” (qtd. in Saunders 61). There is a striking account of the monumental Crimean paintings by Lady Butler so admired in the 1870s, and I was very grateful to have been introduced to a poem entirely unknown...

Isobel Hurst, Victorian Women Writers and the Classics. The Feminine of Homer

Paru dans la collection « Classical Presences », cet ouvrage issu d’une these soutenue en 2003 a l’Universite d’Oxford, explore le lien entre les femmes ecrivains de l’epoque victorienne et les etudes classiques, the Feminine of Homer faisant reference au reve prophetique d’Elizabeth Barrett Browning, une des plus grandes figures de la poesie du xixe siecle, de devenir l’Homere feminin de la litterature (p. 7 ; p. 113-118). A cette thematique qui constitue l’objet principal de l’ouvrage, est ...

Isobel Hurst: Victorian Women Writers and the Classics. The Feminine of Homer

Isobel Hurst: Victorian Women Writers and the Classics. The Feminine of Homer. Oxford: Oxford UP 2006. VIII, 253 S. (Classical presences.) 45 £.

Victorian Women Writers and the Classics: The Feminine of Homer, by Isobel Hurst

<i>Victorian Women Writers and the Classics: The Feminine of Homer</i>, by Isobel Hurst

ISOBEL HURST. Victorian Women Writers and the Classics: The Feminine of Homer.

ISOBEL HURST. Victorian Women Writers and the Classics: The Feminine of Homer.

The rebel, the lady and the ‘anti’: Femininity, anti-feminism, and the Victorian woman writer

Synopsis Anti-feminist journalists and women writers had a crucial role in contributing to the feminist debate in Victorian Britain. As an organized political movement Victorian anti-feminism significantly post-dated the rise of anti-feminist literature in the mid-century, which was born in response to first-wave feminism; it was not until half a century later, in the 1890s and 1900s, that campaigns such as the ‘Appeal against Women's Suffrage’ (1891) and political organizations like the National Women's Anti-Suffrage League (1908) came into being. Anti-feminist journalism and fiction thus had more in common with its feminist counterpart than with any distinct political movement from which it might have arisen. This raises the question of how productive the binary category ‘feminist/anti-feminist’ is in ascribing ideological currency to Victorian women's writing. Certainly the boundaries between feminist and anti-feminist positions were more permeable and fluid than might be assumed in the twenty-first century. In Victorian women's fiction, the figure of the woman rebel was invoked by feminists as much as by writers like Eliza Lynn Linton, Margaret Oliphant, and Mary Ward who, while distancing themselves from the political demands of first-wave feminism, promoted a measure of female independence in both private and public life. Dedicated feminist writers and political activists like Sarah Grand and Elizabeth Robins, on the other hand, could at times embrace distinctly anti-feminist positions. What unites feminist and anti-feminist writing of the Victorian period is its central concern with questions of femininity, each side laying claim to ‘authentic’ as opposed to the other camp's ‘artificial’, flawed, corrupted or unsexed femininity. This marked emphasis on femininity signals deep-felt ambivalences in the writers' identities frequently rooted in conflicting personal and professional roles. Thus Arabella Kenealy, a physician as well as a writer, depicted medical women as sexual neuters, and yet invested them with enormous physical strength and moral authority. In this article we will investigate the concept and performance of femininity as the central battleground between ‘feminist’ and ‘anti-feminist’ positions in order to explore the question of categorization that arises for any anthologizer—or digitizer—of Victorian women writers' (anti-)feminism.

Little Pilgrim's Progress: Literary Horizons for Children's Literature

The Woman's Building at the World's Columbian Exposition highlighted works by women authors, many of whom wrote for or about children, in the decade before children's literature was institutionalized by publishers and librarians. This noncanonical, eclectic assortment of children's literature exists within an interpretive framework-the horizons of expectations-by which children's books were received by late Victorian America. Drawing on reception theory, I construct the cultural climate of reception by which the art and commerce of children's books were idealized and realized. The books on the shelves of the Woman's Building Library function as mirror and lamp, reflecting American culture but also constructing that culture, a pilgrimage into literary romanticism and the cultural work of Victorian women writers in their sensational designs to move human hearts and change the world.

‘Maenads dancing before the Martyrs’ memorial’: Oxford women writers and the classical tradition

For prominent Victorian women writers such as Elizabeth Barrett Browning and George Eliot some degree of classical education was closely associated with successful literary ambitions, but the schools and universities where the classics were taught remained closed to them. Women achieved full membership of Oxford university after the First World War, around the same time as the compulsory Greek element of the Oxford degree was abolished. Before this, many women students had to pursue intensive courses of Greek even when their main subject of study was English or history. Aspiring writers such as Vera Brittain and Dorothy L. Sayers rushed through classical texts like theIliad and theAeneid in the original languages, later producing imaginative and often challenging reworkings of classical texts which reflect the experiences of the modern, educated woman. The adaptation of epic themes to modern forms such as the First World War memoir and the detective story is an important similarity in Sayers’ and Brittain’s literary responses to classical literature.

Reviving the reformation: victorian women writers and the protestant historical novel

For Protestant women anxious about the apparent threat posed by a newly “aggressive” Roman Catholicism to modern British culture, the historical novel offered an especially appealing outlet. In particular, novelists turned to the Reformation as a means of generating analogies for and arguments about the current religious “crisis”. The result was a new subgenre of historical fiction, the “Reformation tale”, which writers employed for a number of theological and political purposes: as a warning against a return to the oppressive Catholic past, as a means of modelling the ideal Christian hero, as a way of encouraging political action – even martyrdom. Women novelists without the theological or linguistic training necessary to undertake ecclesiastical history could thus participate in and, perhaps, shape contemporary debates about Roman Catholicism's increasing presence in the public sphere.

Reviving the reformation: victorian women writers and the protestant historical novel

Reviving the reformation: victorian women writers and the protestant historical novel

Popular Victorian women writers

Popular Victorian women writers considers a diverse group of women writers within the Victorian literary marketplace. It looks at authors such as Ellen Wood, Mary Braddon, Rhoda Broughton and Charlotte Yonge as well as less well-known writers including Jessie Fothergill and Eliza Meteyard. Each essay sets the individual author within her biographical and literary context and provides refreshing insights into her work. Together they bring the work of largely unknown authors and new perspectives on known authors to critical and public attention. Accessible and informative, the book is ideal for students of Victorian literature and culture as well as tutors and scholars of the period.

Silent voices: forgotten novels by Victorian women writers

Preface Introduction by Brenda Ayres Not the Superiority of Belief, But Superiority of True Devotion: Grace Aguilar's Histories of the Spirit by Miriam Elizabeth Burstein Victorian Heroine Goes A-Governessing by Cecilia Wadso Lecaros Detective Maidservant: Catherine Crowe's Susan Hopley by Lucy Sussex Deathbeds and Didacticism: Charlotte Elizabeth Tonna and Victorian by Mary Lenard Class Counts: Domestic-Professional Writer, the Working Poor and Middle-Class Values in Years That the Locust Hath Eaten and Story of a Modern Woman by Sueann Schatz On the Face of the Waters: Flora Annie Steel and the Politics of Feminist Imperialism by LeeAnne Richardson Rereading the Domestic Novel: Anne Thackeray's Story of Elizabeth by Helen Debenham I am not Esther: Biblical Heroines and Sarah Grand's Challenge to Institutional Christianity in Heavenly Twins by Jennifer Stolpa Dinah Mulock Craik: Sacrifice and the Fairy-order by Robyn Chandler Marie Corelli: The Story of One Forgotten by Brenda Ayres Bibliography Index

A Literature of My Own: Living with Victorian Women Writers

Elaine Showalter describes her research on Victorian women authors in the 1970s leanding to her ground breaking work of feminist literary criticism, A Literary of Their Own, and the necessity of creating her own research collection of book by these authors. This article is based on a lecture at Rutgers on the occasion of her donating her collection to the Rutgers University Libraries.

THE CLOISTERED PEN: PENETRATION AND CONCEPTION IN ELIZA KEARY'S “CHRISTINE AND MARY: A CORRESPONDENCE”

ELIZA KEARY (1828–1914) AND HER sister Annie (1825–1879) are two of many Victorian women writers whose works remain largely unexplored by scholars. Although Eliza Keary's poetry has been singled out as containing “unorthodox” rhyme and meter for the time period, a limited amount of criticism has taken Keary's work into consideration (Lustig).See Armstrong's comparison of Eliza Keary's “Christine and Mary” with Gerard Manley Hopkins's “The Wreck of the Deutschland” (26–28); Roden discusses the homoerotic and heteronormative aspects of “Christine and Mary.” He also locates Keary in a context of mysticism (“Religious Homoeroticism” 1–14). Her poetry's subject matter is also “unorthodox”: “Christine and Mary: A Correspondence,” the longest poem in Keary's first volume of poetry, Little Seal-Skin and Other Poems (1874), explores religious choices through sensual imagery which might not have had the sympathy, although probably did have the interest, of a mainstream Victorian readership.Analyses of religious and sexual spaces that intersect in Victorian literature have primarily centered on male writers such as Oscar Wilde, John Henry Newman, and Gerard Manley Hopkins. Roden's Same-Sex Desire in Victorian Religious Culture discusses these writers as well as Christina Rossetti and Eliza Keary in the context of mystic asceticism and sexuality. See Buckton for a discussion of Newman's autobiography as sexual self-confession; Saville deals with Hopkins's poetry in the context of his religion and his sexuality; Hanson's work addresses Oscar Wilde and the decadent movement within the contexts of Catholicism and homosexuality. An emphasis on the religious aspects of Victorian women's writings can be found in Krueger and Melnyk. See Roden's “‘Sisterhood Is Powerful’” and “The Kiss of the Soul” for more on Christina Rossetti. Keary's poem consists of a set of epistles between Mary, who has recently joined a Roman Catholic convent, and her female friend Christine, who remains outside of the cloister. While women in convents were typically depicted as repressed, unnatural, and unproductive since they chose not to seek marriage and motherhood, Keary's character Mary offers a version of the cloister in which women can express and fulfill their desires and are productive through creative enterprises. Keary's portrayal of the convent forces us to consider the ways in which conventual life during this time afforded some women a positive, creative, and fulfilling alternative to the more socially acceptable, although not necessarily socially- or self-empowering, roles of mother, wife, daughter, sister, or spinster.

“Her Director, Her Priest,... Her God”: Victorian Women Writers on Confession

“Her Director, Her Priest,... Her God”: Victorian Women Writers on Confession

“Her Director, Her Priest,... Her God”: Victorian Women Writers on Confession

“Her Director, Her Priest,... Her God”: Victorian Women Writers on Confession

Victorian Women Writers and the Woman Question (review)

Victorian Women Writers and the Woman Question (review)

Lost Horizons: Rereading and Reclaiming Victorian Women Writers

"The girls of today cannot see themselves in Miss Yonge and that is their chief demand from literature" -Edith Sichel, Monthly Review, May 1901 The depths to which the reputation of popular conservative Victorian novelist, Charlotte Yonge, had sunk by the end of the nineteenth century are reflected in Oscar Wilde's reaction to being told a condemned man was reading one of Yonge's novels: "My heart was turned by the eyes of the doomed man, but if he reads The Heir of Redclyffe it's perhaps as well to let the law take its course" (Ellman 202).