Victorian Women Research Articles

An Interview with Andrea Broomfield, the First Recipient of the VanArsdel Prize

An Interview with Andrea Broomfield, the First Recipient of the VanArsdel Prize Jordan Osterman (bio) Click for larger view View full resolution Photo credit: Bret Gustafson, 2015 [End Page 425] Andrea Broomfield, PhD, is a professor of English at Johnson County Community College in Overland Park, Kansas, and has been a longtime member of the Research Society for Victorian Periodicals. In 1990, she was the recipient of the first VanArsdel Essay Prize. A mentee of the late Sally Mitchell, Broomfield transitioned into her current focus on food writing and historicism more than fifteen years ago. Throughout that time, she has done extensive research and writing, especially on Victorian food and dining. She was the co-editor with Sally Mitchell of Prose by Victorian Women: An Anthology. She is also the author of Food and Cooking in Victorian England: A History and Kansas City: A Food Biography. Her publications in Victorian Periodicals Review have included "Interdisciplinary Work and Periodicals Connections: An Issue in Honor of Sally H. Mitchell" and "Rushing Dinner to the Table: The Englishwoman's Domestic Magazine and Industrialization's Effect on Middle-Class Food and Cooking, 1852–1860." Jordan Osterman: What has it been like for you to be involved with RSVP over the years? Andrea Broomfield: If it wasn't for Sally Mitchell, my route as a food historian would have taken a very different path, maybe not a path at all. I was brought up in RSVP; it made me who I am. I didn't have to go through the anxiety and fear that a lot of young grad students have about scholarship because I was so welcomed into this group. There's no way I would have been able to build my network and confidence, to understand the ropes of academe, if not for RSVP. [End Page 426] After first being introduced to the society, my network continued to grow. When I won the VanArsdel Prize in 1990, I did not merely fly down to Waco, Texas, where the RSVP Conference was held that year, to pick up a plaque. Instead, I was invited by many scholars in the organization to play an active part in the conference. Sally was instrumental in introducing me around, but I was tremendously grateful that I could meet people on my own and begin to develop professional relationships. George Worth, Maria Frawley, Barbara Quinn Schmidt, Dick Fulton, and Louis James were just some of the RSVP members I met in Waco and began to develop important connections with. While I was never able to meet Rosemary VanArsdel in person, she and I began a letter exchange and occasionally talked on the phone. She wrote reference letters for me and opened doors. This type of generosity and collegiality was overwhelming to someone who had always assumed that academe was a cutthroat business where you had to watch out for potential sabotage. Maybe I had read too many David Lodge novels! The next thing I knew, I was graduating and starting my first job. Once I became a professor, RSVP members still nurtured me, giving me leads and helping me. I feel like I didn't contribute very much to RSVP, but its members contributed a lot to me. I owe them a very big debt of gratitude. What makes this society so special is that it started as a group of people with a desperate need for information about periodicals, but much of that information didn't exist. A group of people had to come together with a mission of trying to attribute hundreds of anonymous articles to authors and create a theory for how to read and understand this journalistic material, whether the author was known or was stubbornly anonymous. The mission these founders had was straightforward but pretty profound. The society still retains so many vestiges of that mission: why periodicals matter and how they should and shouldn't be used. The organization has grown, but it still has an intimacy. RSVP has a unique story about how and why it started, and it welcomes members and embraces newcomers. It doesn't make people feel excluded. Jordan Osterman: You wrote in your tribute to Sally Mitchell (in...

Frederick W. Lowndes, MRCSE and Surgeon to the Liverpool Lock Hospital: Prostitution and Venereal Disease in the 1880s

The aim of this paper is to analyse the perpetuation of the myth of the fallen woman in the rescue work and the cure of prostitutes in Liverpool in the 1880s. To this end, Frederick Lowndes’ 1886 publication, Prostitution and Venereal Diseases in Liverpool, will be discussed as an example of a text written by a medical authority concerned with sexual promiscuity and the spread of venereal disease. Prostitution had cultural and moral implications for Victorians, and prostitutes represented a threat to middle-class society as the very image of vice and public disorder itself. Lowndes offers an overview of the issue for the years leading up to the publication of his pamphlet, dealing with issues like the role of brothels, the causes of prostitution in Liverpool and the classification of these women into different categories, thus echoing some of the ideas of moral reformers and medical men concerning the Great Social Evil. The role played by local laws in the containment of this public vice and of the Liverpool Lock Hospital in the treatment of the diseases considered to be the result of prostitution will be analysed in the light of Lowndes’ text and ideas. My intention is to prove that seclusion of deviant elements of society together with their classification and indoctrination were still present in the medical and moral discourses of the latter part of the Victorian period. Similarly, Foucauldian notions concerning deviancy and discipline will be discussed together with Butlerian ideas about gender and sexuality in the context of Victorian respectability and womanhood.

The Independence and the Pursuit of Identity of the Victorian Woman in The Tenant of Wildfell Hall

The Independence and the Pursuit of Identity of the Victorian Woman in The Tenant of Wildfell Hall

Contradictory Depictions of the New Woman: Reading Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence as a Dialogic Novel

Critical debate pertaining to the themes of gender and marriage in Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence (1920) has often focused on May and Ellen as the representation of two contrasting images of female identity: “angelic” and “monstrous” respectively. Drawing on Mikhail Bakhtin’s concept of dialogic novel, this article offers an alternative reading. In particular, it aims to examine the previously overlooked complexities in the novel’s decentered narrative, notably its dialogic form in which a multiplicity of contending voices and perspectives on women, marriage and divorce are juxtaposed. By adopting this theoretical and methodological stance, the article offers fresh analytical perspectives on the novel and argues that, by depicting Ellen’s performances of shifting subjectivities (the rebel who is seeking a divorce, the unfortunate victim of an unfaithful husband, the lover who desires a new life), the novel not only undermines the dominant ideologies of Victorian womanhood but also disrupts the image of the radical, independent New Woman who challenges social conventions.

Early Women Scientists of Los Angeles Harbor

Abstract Los Angeles Harbor, in San Pedro Bay, has long drawn scientific researchers, from its days as a 19th century muddy tide flat to today’s industrial complex of man-made channels and wharves. A marine biological laboratory was established on Terminal Island as an outpost of the University of California and operating for the summers of 1901 and 1902. As it was a teaching laboratory, it attracted women students and researchers. Two Los Angeles women associated with the laboratory and who made contributions to the advancement of biology were Sarah P. Monks, an instructor at the Los Angeles Normal School and Martha Burton Williamson, a self-taught conchologist. These women were born in the 1840’s and grew up at a time when scientific pursuits were not the norm for the proper Victorian women. Both had done research in Los Angeles Harbor before the laboratory on Terminal Island was opened and both continued their independent research in the harbor after the laboratory was relocated to San Diego. Both wome...

A Portrayal of Victorian Men And Women As Seen In O'neill's “The Grand Match”

ABSTRACT  This paper analyzes the portrayal of Victorian women and men in the poem of Moira O'Neill, entitled “The Grand Match”. The poem gives the description of men and women relationship related to the discussion of love and marriage. As one of Victorian female poets, O'Neill tries to satirize the relationship of women and men by portraying the love story of a stereotypical male fortune seeker, who marries a rich woman and denies his own feeling toward a young-charming woman. This study is an attempt to show that O'Neill's female characters are not typically women commonly found in a literary text during the era in which it was written. In many ways they position themselves as a complete break from the traditional stereotyping of women, and they even can be seen as the representation of “New Woman”. In addition, through this study, the readers would be able to broaden their perspectives that although the Victorian Age was known as the era of prose, there are a lot of poems worth reading.

Angels and Feathers: Transcorporeal Morphing in Angela Carter’s Nights at the Circus

ABSTRACTFocusing on the corporeal and social interconnectedness between women and animals, this article discusses Angela Carter’s Nights at the Circus (1984) and its exploration of literal and metaphorical woman–animal transcorporeal imaginings. At the time of its publication, the influence of Thatcher’s family politics advocated the Victorian model of the working father/husband supporting the stay-at-home mother/wife, which also revived women’s interest in animal protection movements due to their role as moral caretakers. Nights at the Circus returns to the late nineteenth century to examine naturally and socially intertwined constructions of Victorian women to deconstruct and complicate gender ideals. By spotlighting a bird-woman as its protagonist, the novel’s scientific and fantastic experimentation with human and nonhuman intermixing stimulates vigorous interactions between the materiality of the woman’s body and her sociocultural identities to redevelop the modern woman as a dynamically interconnected being in transformation.

The Cambridge Companion to Victorian Women’s Writing

The Cambridge Companion to Victorian Women’s Writing effectively opens up to undergraduate students the wealth of literature produced by Victorian women writers. In her informative Introduction to ...

The Cambridge companion to Victorian women's writing

The Cambridge Companion to Victorian Women's Writing brings together chapters by leading scholars to provide innovative and comprehensive coverage of Victorian women writers' careers and literary achievements. While incorporating the scholarly insights of modern feminist criticism, it also reflects new approaches to women authors that have emerged with the rise of book history; periodical studies; performance studies; post-colonial studies; and scholarship on authorship, readership, and publishing. It traces the Victorian woman writer's career-from making her debut to working with publishers and editors to achieving literary fame-and challenges previous thinking about genres in which women contributed with success. Chapters on poetry, including a discussion of poetry in colonial and imperial contexts, reveal women's engagements with each other and male writers. Discussions on drama, life-writing, reviewing, history, travel writing, and children's literature uncover the remarkable achievement of women in fields relatively unknown--

Review: Second Person Singular: Late Victorian Women Poets and the Bonds of Verse by Emily Harrington

Review: Second Person Singular: Late Victorian Women Poets and the Bonds of Verse by Emily Harrington

Revolutionary Poetic Voices of Victorian Period: A Comparative Study between Elizabeth Barrette Browning and Christina Rossetti

<p>This article is an attempt to provide a comparative study between Elizabeth Barrette Browning and Christina Rossetti, two famous authors in the Victorian period. As the first female poet Browning throws a challenge by dismantling and mingling the form of epic and novel in her famous creation <em>Aurora Leigh. </em>This epic structurally and thematically offers a new form that questions the contemporary prejudices about women. Being influenced and inspired by Browning, Rossetti shows her mastery on sonnets in <em>Monna Innominata: A Sonnet of Sonnets</em>. Diversity in the themes of her poem allows Rossetti to demonstrate her intellect and independent thinking, which represents the cultural dilemma of Victorian women. Though Browning is addressed as the ‘first female poet’ and the pioneer of revolutionary female poets, her <em>Aurora Leigh </em>recognizes and celebrates the success of a female poet in that period but at the same time acknowledges the importance of traditional romance as well as marriage union at the end of the poem. On the other hand, in <em>Mona Innominata, </em>Rossetti mingles the traditional idea of romance with High Anglican belief to establish and uphold the position of women in the society as an individual and self sufficient one. She is the first poet in Victorian period who boldly denies the dominance of men in a woman’s life by celebrating sisterhood in her another famous work <em>Goblin Market</em>. Though Browning and Rossetti belong to the same period, Rossetti is quite advanced than Browning in terms of experimenting with forms, themes and breaking the conventions of Victorian era.</p>

Indigenous birth outcomes at a Victorian urban hospital, a retrospective 5-year cohort study 2010-2014.

Indigenous people in Australia experience higher rates of preterm birth and low birthweight than their nonindigenous counterparts. There is currently no data on these rates from Victoria, with the data coming from states with higher indigenous proportions. Five years (1st January 2010-31st December 2014) of retrospective data from The Northern Hospital's (Melbourne, Victoria) database were analysed. Mothers and babies were split according to self-reported indigenous status: 13800 nonindigenous mothers, 185 indigenous mothers, 301 indigenous babies and 13843 nonindigenous babies. Primary outcomes measured were low birthweight (LBW) and preterm birth. There was a higher incidence of indigenous babies born preterm (8.8% vs 5.9%, P = 0.034), but the adjusted odds ratios for preterm birth were not significant (indigenous babies OR 1.19, 95% CI: 0.77-1.87, indigenous mothers OR 0.97, CI: 0.52-1.80). There was a similar incidence of LBW among indigenous and nonindigenous babies (6.5% vs 5.4%, P = 0.416). The rate of indigenous women smoking was 29.3% compared to 12.3% of nonindigenous women (P < 0.001), and 40.3% were obese compared to 28.7% (P = 0.001). Indigenous women had lower rates of diabetes (pre-existing or gestational diabetes, 6.1% vs 13.5% P = 0.003). Heterogeneity of indigenous people and geography means that inferences about indigenous health are difficult to make. It appears that Victorian urban indigenous women have similar rates of preterm birth and LBW to nonindigenous women. While there were pleasing results concerning LBW, antenatal care, diabetes and preterm birth, the rates of smoking and obesity remain a challenge in the indigenous population.

Women Poets

Women Poets Emily Harrington (bio) Work on Victorian women’s poetry from 2015 tends to focus on materiality in a variety of ways. From print culture to ecocriticism to a concern with social justice, work on women’s poetry from 2015 seems especially interested in how the poetry circulated, and how it was in conversation not only with the work of male peers, but how it participated in the social, cultural, and natural environment. The most comprehensive treatment of women’s poetry to come out in 2015 was Fabienne Moine’s Women Poets in the Victorian Era: Cultural Practices and Nature Poetry (Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2015), which offers a welcome, timely focus on a capacious subject. Moine investigates “long-standing beliefs that women shared a particular affinity with the natural world” (p. 2), with an eye to how the poetry variously both reinforces and subverts dominant ideologies about both gender and nature. Her chapters concentrate on certain elements in the natural world, “flowers, gardens, parks, pets, and birds,” because they “represent nature under control” and they “engage in politics in unexpected ways” (p. 3). Moine asserts that her concentration on elements of nature rather than on nature as a whole mirrors the women poets’ tendency to observe nature in order to understand its categories and details, over a contemplation springing from nature, or an expansive sense of self as in the Romantic poets. This focus on observation and natural history, taking nature on its own terms, can have a moral effect, though, Moine argues, increasing the capacity for empathy in the observer. Throughout, Moine notes women poets’ particular investment in the intersection between the contained nature, represented by agriculture and gardens, and the wild, represented by wildflowers, weeds, and birds. She considers a number of poems that focus on these wild elements, particularly weeds, as a way of arguing for the protection of what is devalued. In the less politically motivated poems, it’s a kind of performance of modesty, but in others, weed flowers are highlighted to democratize the value of plants. To be commended for its breadth, the book considers “over 250 works by more than 100 women poets” (p. 11). Moine’s book will be a rich resource for those looking for newly recovered women poets and working-class poets, as well as those seeking an ecocritical approach to poets well within the canon and on its margins. Some poets featured in the book include Dora Greenwell, Isabella Southern, Eliza Cook, E. Nesbit, May Kendall, Mary Howitt, Violet [End Page 398] Fane, Dora Sigerson, Anna Knox, Emily Pfeiffer, and Mathilde Blind, just to name a few. Yet the capaciousness of this book is both its greatest virtue and its greatest flaw; its very breadth of resources undermines its ability to make a focused argument. Each chapter views its subject from a set of different and often contradictory lenses. On the one hand, this approach accounts with accuracy for the real variety in Victorian women’s poetry and in their ideas about nature. On the other hand, the book and the chapters within often lack a coherent overall argument, even if several smaller cogent analyses are to be found within them. Most importantly, Women Poets in the Victorian Era: Cultural Practices and Nature Poetry demonstrates how much work there is to be done on this subject. The time is ripe for ecocritical considerations of Victorian women’s poetry. Patricia Murphy takes up this call in “Ecofeminist Whispers: The Interrogation of ‘Feminine Nature’ in Mathilde Blind’s Short Poetry,” Nineteenth-Century Gender Studies 11, no. 1 (Spring 2015). Murphy finds an incipient ecofeminism in Mathilde Blind’s poetry because the poems point out how nature and women have been identified with each other in order to place both in a place of submission. She reads poems such as “Entangled” and “On a Forsaken Lark’s Nest” as “cautionary tales” against this identification. While this argument is persuasive, this article is at times not fully attuned to Blind’s representation of destruction as coming from numerous quarters, from humans certainly, but also from ruthless nature itself. The will to see agriculture, for instance, as a “rape” of the land, overemphasizes...

Nude Bodies: The Controversial Aesthetics of Exposure

Nude Bodies:The Controversial Aesthetics of Exposure Chris Kent (bio) Nude was a relative term for Victorians, and perhaps all the more thrilling for that. It generally applied to the female body, for both in art and in fact, male nudity was in low demand. Men's fashion saw the triumph of the tubular suit, that egalitarian outfit that, if anything, privileged the physique of men with thin legs and shoulders like coat hangers. Combined with high collars, spats, gloves, and the newly fashionable beard, it meant that about ninety-nine per cent of the properly dressed male body was concealed in public. The general fashion rule for the male body was the less of it showing, the better. Women's fashion, by contrast, featured strategic nudity. If the female body from the waist down was taboo territory, the bust, arms, shoulders, and neck were very much in play. Queen Victoria, who was proud of her shoulders (Munich 64), required décolleté dresses for ladies appearing in court, strictly enforcing that rule until she was almost seventy, when she made known that she would give permission to those, such as infirm or older ladies, who applied through the Lord Chamberlain to wear a "high dress." "No lady who has a good neck and shoulders will wear a high dress," a fashionable dressmaker confidently predicted ("The Queen and Court Dresses" 7). On the stage, "nudity is 'the only wear,'" reported a London newspaper in 1869, noting the scanty costume worn by Nelly Powers as Robinson Crusoe in the Christmas pantomime of that name at Covent Garden ("The Pantomimes" 11). Attractive women played almost all the parts, male and female, in the pantomimes, burlesques, and extravaganzas that were generally the most profitable productions in the Victorian theatre. The few men on these stages were reduced to playing comic roles, including old women. Transvestism ruled because the female body put bums on seats. Male dress enabled the female body, and above all the female leg, which Victorian women's fashion conspired to mystify and conceal, to be openly displayed. The ballet, simultaneously vulgarized and incorporated into spectacles, saw the triumph of the flaring tutu, knee-length and higher, and the reduction of male dancers to lifting devices. Women were increasingly popular in music hall and circus acts. The diarist Arthur Munby, a close observer of the female body, thought "it [was] not well to see a nude man fling a nude girl about … or to see her grip his body in mid-air between her seemingly bare thighs" (qtd. in Smith 54). The first "human cannonball," the beautiful and sensational young "Lulu"—protege of the notable Canadian acrobat William Hunt, who styled himself "the Great Farini"—was actually a boy in drag (Peacock 198). So incensed was the American actress Olive Logan that in "The Nude Woman Question," she denounced the "nude drama" and the "leg business" that were driving respectable, legitimate actresses like herself off the stage (193). [End Page 1] Queen Victoria was an enthusiastic patron of the nude in art. She and Prince Albert frequently gave each other nude paintings and statues as birthday presents. She evidently subscribed to the view of William Etty, a prominent painter of the nude, that "God's most glorious work [was] WOMAN, that all human beauty had been concentrated in her" (qtd. in Lambourne 282). Reconciling the female nude and Christian morals entailed certain artistic conventions intended to discharge the nude's eroticism. The most familiar was to distance the nude subject in space, time, and culture by situating it in pre-Christian Greece or Rome, or in the harems and slave markets of the Islamic Middle East. However, the medieval English setting of Edwin Landseer's Lady Godiva's Prayer (c. 1865) was too close for some critics' comfort (Smith 55). The model Eliza Crowe, who claimed to have sat for early sketches of Landseer's controversial painting, also modelled for Etty. Much better known by her professional name, Madame Warton, she conducted a tableau vivant troupe that was the best known of its era. Tableaux vivants were perhaps the most controversial manifestations of Victorian nudity. These productions went under several names...

Chance Encounters, Rediscovery, and Loss: Researching Victorian Women Journalists in the Digital Age

This essay explores the uncertain status of social media and feminist scholarly websites in the study of Victorian women and the periodical press. I begin this investigation with an extended case study focused on poet-journalist Eliza Cook (1812–89), who capitalized on the emergence of a new journalistic medium in the 1830s and ’40s—the cheap Sunday newspaper. These newspapers provided unprecedented opportunities for women to participate in print culture as writers and editors. By the early twentieth century, Cook, like so many other Victorian women journalists, disappeared from literary history, only to be revived in second- and third-wave feminist scholarship and, more informally, on social media. Yet in many open-access and subscription scholarly sites dedicated to Victorian writers, Cook is absent. Many of these sites have inadvertently created digital collections of Victorian women’s writing that omit the work of women journalists like Cook and the periodical contexts in which their writing was produced and disseminated. Through my investigation of Cook’s afterlife in social media and online scholarly sites, I raise theoretical and methodological issues that will allow us to think critically about the digital future of feminist periodicals research both inside and outside the academy.

Воспитание «ангела дома»: детство, девичество и культурные практики эпохи викторианства. Рецензия на работу: Кристианы Биндер «От невинности к опыту: (ре)конструкции детства в автобиографиях викторианок» – WVT Wissenchftlicher Verlag Trier, 2014. – 402 с.

Воспитание «ангела дома»: детство, девичество и культурные практики эпохи викторианства. Рецензия на работу: Кристианы Биндер «От невинности к опыту: (ре)конструкции детства в автобиографиях викторианок» – WVT Wissenchftlicher Verlag Trier, 2014. – 402 с.

Volume Introduction

8 Victorians Journal Volume Introduction This year has seen a plethora of good new work on the Brontes. Clare Harman’s biography, Charlotte Bronte: A Fiery Heart, tells Bronte’s story powerfully once again to a new audience. The Bronte Parsonage hosted numerous celebratory events, including an international conference centering on Victorian women’s issues held in Manchester, at which Bronte scholars Christine Alexander and Sally Shuttleworth spoke, in company with biographer Clare Harman and feminist writer Germaine Greer. Renowned Bronte juvenilia scholar Alexander and emerging scholar Sara L. Pearson co-wrote Celebrating Charlotte Bronte: Transforming Life into Literature in Jane Eyre, under the aegis of the Bronte Parsonage Museum, a beautiful and wonderfully useful book that connects the material objects ofCharlotte Bronte’s life with the novel Jane Eyre. The exhibit Charlotte Bronte: An Independent Will, held at The Morgan Library & Museum in New York City (Sept. 9,2016—Jan. 2,2017), continues to draw crowds ofBronte readers; the exhibition catalogue, The Brontes: A Family Writes, by Christine Nelson is a beautiful, informative book. If anyone imagined that no more could be said about Charlotte Bronte’s work, they must have been pleasantly surprised when many volumes were published this year, full of profound and illuminating insights into Bronte’s life, writings, and visual art. From collections on the influence of her early Angrian writings upon her mature work' and themed volumes1 2 to compendiums that include new essays on all the Brontes (including Branwell and Patrick),3 the fascination with the Brontes’ lives and work continues unabated into the twenty-first century. This volume of essays continues longstanding debates while exploring original avenues ofresearch and opening new areas ofdiscussion. The germinal work ofKaren Chase in Eros and Psyche: The Representation of Personality in the Works of 1 Charlotte Brontefrom the Beginnings: Xew Essaysfrom the Juvenilia to the Major Works, edited by Lucy Morrison and Judith Pike (Routledge 2016). 2 See Time. Space, andPlace in Charlotte Bronte, ed. Diane Long Hoeveler and Deborah Denenholz Morse (July 2016). 3 See The Blackwell Companion to the Brontes, ed. Diane Long Hoeveler and Deborah Denenholz Morse (May 2016); Charlotte Bronte: Legacies andAfterlives, ed. Amber Regis and Deborah Wynne (Manchester LIP 2016); The Brontes andthe Idea ofthe Hitman: Science. Ethics, & the Imagination, ed. Alexandra Lewis (forthcoming Cambridge, April 2017). Victorians Journal 9 Charlotte Bronte, Charles Dickens, and George Eliot, and of Sally Shuttleworth in Charlotte Bronte and Victorian Psychology into Bronte’s knowledge of mental disorders strongly influences this volume, beginning with the opening essay by Diane Long Hoeveler. Hoeveler builds on Chase’s insights into Bronte’s imagining of mind and the representation ofemotion and personality as having its roots in Angria. Chase herself offers an essay in this volume that takes her critique in new directions as she reads Bronte’s fiction in light ofthe “domestic uncanny.” Chase’s focus upon narrative structure and literary genre is also the center of Ezra Feldman’s paper on “Weird Weather.” Another complex of issues in Charlotte Bronte scholarship focuses on gender, including articles by Beverly Taylor, Richard Kaye, Laura Struve, Anthony D’Agostino, Susan Taylor, and Kimberley Dimitriadis. Some essays revisit old discourses—Marie-Antoinette Smith (religious pilgrimage) and Patrick Fessenbecker (philosophy)—while others interrogate such vibrantly emerging scholarly discourses as the significance ofhands (Kimberly Cox), astronomy and science (Dimitriadis), and the poetics of“weird” texts (Feldman). What follows is a precis of each essay, offered with the intention of helping readers begin with their most passionate Brontean interests. Our hope is that readers will go on to engage with all of these fine essays. The breadth and depth ofthis work will be evident to all who read this new scholarship, and we are honored to have been chosen as editors of this volume dedicated to the wonderful Bronte scholar, the late Diane Long Hoeveler. Reader, we miss her. ft************** Diane Long Hoeveler, in her theoretically complex essay “Charlotte Bronte’s Oeuvre as Fantasy Fiction,” argues that at the center ofBronte’s “early works, as well as her later mature novels, is a type of fantasy writing, for all ofthese works attempt to accomplish the cultural and personal work that lies at the heart...

Alfred Thompson Bricher’s a Pensive Moment and Winslow Homer’s the New Novel

Alfred Thompson Bricher’s a Pensive Moment and Winslow Homer’s the New Novel Daniel E. Sachs Abstract In the 1870s, amidst a virtual explosion of socially relevant as well as nostalgic images attempting to aid in the recuperation of a nation having survived a long and violent Civil War, Winslow Homer and Alfred Thompson Bricher created and exhibited a pair of watercolor compositions that addressed the gender and sexual issues arising in the mid- to late Victorian era. These images may well have been inspired by the two artists’ personal experiences and also their positive attitudes towards women, but also likely encouraged by an ever increasing Women’s Rights movement led by women such as Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and others as early as the 1840s. The movement gained tremendous momentum in the post-Civil War period. Tradition- challenging Homer and sometimes provocative Bricher painted two paintings that prove to be well worth exploring because of their clearly different though equally compelling images of young Victorian women reading. Reading was very much the domain of men in this period, so when novels started becoming a commonplace, inexpensive item to which young women gravitated, many men of high stature saw it as detrimental and worthy of their criticism. Full Text: PDF DOI: 10.15640/ijaah.v4n2a1

The Cambridge Companion to Victorian Women’s Writing ed. by Linda H. Peterson

The Cambridge Companion to Victorian Women’s Writing ed. by Linda H. Peterson

Engaging and Recruiting Underserviced Populations of Rural Victorian Women for Breast Health

Abstract Introduction: Evidence has indicated that there is little difference in knowledge between rural and urban women on the awareness of breast cancer risk and incidence, however, some studies have demonstrated that rural women are likely to report greater difficulty accessing services and treatment and are less likely to participate in regular breast care practice, such as breast self-examination or receiving a mammogram. Furthermore, evidence suggests that with an effective health behavioural change strategy, positive breast care practice can be achieved. Method: With this in mind, we developed an initiative which employed a suite of strategies to improve access to breast screening and breast care programs for rural women and implemented this initiative across three different communities. We compared the demand that was created in each locale and the subsequent recruitment of rural women to the initiative, including the number of women attending mammography. Results: Case A demonstrated the strength of the initial recruitment strategies in the context that these were rigorously and consistently applied which contributed to successful demand creation and subsequent recruitment of women to the program. Where any of these elements was not fully addressed, outcomes were adversely affected as demonstrated in Case B, where reduced capacity for recruitment support directly impacted the number of participants recruited and Case C, where failure to identify a champion, together with the collapse of the media program, resulted in no demand. Conclusion: A clearly articulated and funded rural strategy for breast cancer detection is critical to the maintenance of breast health for rural women. Independent of access in metropolitan areas, maintaining resources and specific initiatives for recruiting under-screened rural and remote women is crucial. Research about the effectiveness and sustainability of population-based breast screening programs should continue, but should also include a clear, specific and stand-alone rural focus.