ABSTRACT This article examines debates surrounding artistic integrity, cultural hierarchies and the visual arts in Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s The Lady’s Mile (1866) and Margaret Oliphant’s Miss Marjoribanks (1866). It puts Braddon’s rarely discussed novel in dialogue with Miss Marjoribanks to examine their shared anxieties about the conflicting demands of popular markets and artistic integrity. The Lady’s Mile reveals that even the idealised male celebrity painter is not immune from the influence of the consumer society of the 1860s, although he can easily shed the family responsibilities that dominate the life of self-sacrificing design instructor Rose Lake in Miss Marjoribanks. Although these career narratives are strongly gendered, Braddon traces how concerns about moral corruption and audience influence link high art painters and popular women writers; while Oliphant asserts the value of design as a form of genuine artistic self-expression. Ultimately, both women therefore destabilise artistic hierarchies and the notion of disinterested art in their novels, thus asserting the value of their own productions and modes of working.

ABSTRACT Okehurst – the stately home in Vernon Lee’s “Oke of Okehurst; Or, The Phantom Lover” – is the epitome of English architecture, dating back to “Norman or Saxon” times. Yet inside, the house is populated with far-flung objects and traces of the exotic: Persian rugs, majolica ornaments, and “rose-leaves and spices put into china bowls.” The house and its contents are intoxicating, and nothing is more exotic, perfumed, or exquisite than Alice, who with her husband (and cousin) William Oke are the last members of the family’s line. Okehurst also reverberates with the presences of its previous inhabitants which drive the current Okes to repeat the family’s history of madness and murder. The haunting of Okehurst is particularly interesting when considered alongside material from Lee’s archive. This paper will consider the traces of Lee’s own complex ancestry and the problems of empire and matrilineal ancestral wealth and inheritance, whilst utilising correspondence from Lee to her mother, and her partner, Mary Robinson to suggest the possible inspiration for Cotes Common and Okehurst Manor. Throughout this consideration of haunted spaces – both inside and outside – this paper will also make reference to the 1886 manuscript of “Oke of Okehurst,” which has never previously been studied.

ABSTRACT Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s dramatic monologue “The Portrait” (1870) begins with an elegiac lament from an artist, gazing upon a portrait of his dead beloved: “This is her image as she was:/It seems a thing to wonder on,/As though mine image in a glass/Should tarry when myself am gone.” 1 Rossetti’s verse not only preserves the image of a dead beloved in art, but presents the portrait as a mirror, timelessly preserving the artist’s reflection after he, too, has perished. Rossetti’s poem was one of many nineteenth-century narratives penned by male writers of Aestheticism and Decadence that utilized the preservation of a beautiful woman in portrait form to assuage the male artist’s fear of death. It is this paradox, of existing in art, as an image of both male fears and fantasies, beyond life itself, that this article seeks to explore. Through the examination of two haunted-portrait narratives penned by female writers, Vernon Lee’s “Amour Dure” (1890) and E. Nesbit’s “The Ebony Frame” (1893), the concept of the haunted portrait will be analysed as a seductive force, encapsulating a beautiful young woman residing at the seemingly paradoxical intersection of sexuality and death. In both texts spectral femmes fatales haunt and seduce nineteenth-century male writers for their own, perhaps malign, purposes, allowing for an examination as to how Lee and Nesbit “re-frame” male-authored representations of portraiture. In doing so, it will be discussed how Lee and Nesbit subtly utilize the ghost story to corrupt the prevailing, masculine aesthetic principles of Aestheticism and Decadence, recording the amoral beauty of the femme fatale, and recording the visual subordination of spectator to objet d’art.

When one thinks about the expectations surrounding women’s writing of the eighteenth century, the common tropes of romance stories, parties and voluptuous ballgowns may well appear. Popular televis...

ABSTRACT Absence, and particularly the absent father, has been identified as a common feature in late eighteenth – and nineteenth-century French novels. In an era in which the patriarchal order was changing and the King — the nation’s father — was removed, it is unsurprising that so many of its novels have absent fathers. In the subsequent decades, as many children were left orphans in the wake of the Terror, the lack of a father figure has been identified as a key issue in the crisis of masculinity which arose in nineteenth-century France. The absent father figure has previously been identified as a crucial element in Mme de Staël’s Corinne (1807) and in the work of George Sand. Yet, the influence on the vulnerable young male hero of the absent biological father (and his difficult relationship with a replacement father figure) remains unexplored in the work of other women writers in which it also plays a key role: most notably in Mme Cottin’s Claire d'Albe (1799) and Mme de Krüdener’s Valérie (1803).

For over thirty years, “The Other Voice in Early Modern Europe” series has brought to light texts that had been erased from literary history and revived the contexts and conversations in which thes...

ABSTRACT This essay explores the ways in which Mary Tighe's manuscript novel Selena restages characters and situations from Charlotte Smith's novels Emmeline and Celestina to advance the courtship novel's potential for resisting patriarchal enculturation. The parallels between Selena and Emmeline are striking: both protagonists leave home at seventeen and are stalked by their cousins; both meet their true loves after they commit to relationships with their cousins; both have older unhappily married female friends whose experiences partially represent their authors' autobiographies; and both sustain significant friendships with fallen women they try to help. Many of these parallels resurface in Celestina, which presents a second stalker in Montague Thorold, who serves as a model for a second stalker in Selena, Edwin Stanmore. Comparable to the radical revision of Apuleius Tighe presents in Psyche, Selena transforms episodes from Smith's novels to push harder on their proto–feminist politics, scripting harsher outcomes for the stalkers who pursue Selena and strengthening her psychological and moral autonomy. More than a homage, but not quite a correction, Tighe's attention to Smith in Selena reinterprets the work of a valued predecessor, engaging in what Susan Wolfson designates as a romantic interaction.

A new publication in Routledge’s Among the Victorians and Modernists book series, Thomas Albrecht’s monograph is a very welcome addition to the longstanding but also currently lively critical conve...