The Forgotten Female Aesthetes

Schaffer (English, Queens College, City U. of New York) analyzes the complex dialogue between male and female aesthetes in late Victorian England, exploring the heretofore insufficiently recognized role that women such as Lucas Malet, Ouida, and others played in this influential late Victorian literary movement. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

A startlingly original study, Vernon Lee adds new dimensions to the legacy of this woman of letters whose career spans the transition from the late Victorian to the modernist period. Christa Zorn draws on archival materials to discuss Lee's work in terms of British aestheticism and in the context of the Western European history of ideas.

The fin de siècle not only designated the end of the Victorian epoch but also marked a significant turn towards modernism. Extraordinary Aesthetes critically examines literary and visual artists from England, Ireland, and Scotland whose careers in poetry, fiction, and illustration flourished during the concluding years of the nineteenth century. This collection draws special attention to the exceptional contributions that artists, poets, and novelists made to the cultural world of the late 1880s and 1890s. The essays illuminate a range of established, increasingly acknowledged, and lesser-known figures whose contributions to this brief but remarkably intense cultural period warrant close attention. Such figures include the critically neglected Mabel Dearmer, whose stunning illustrations appear in Evelyn Sharp’s radical fairy tales for children. Equally noteworthy is the uncompromising short fiction of Ella D’Arcy, who played a pivotal role in editing the most famous journal of the 1890s, The Yellow Book. The discussion extends to a range of legendary writers, including Max Beerbohm, Oscar Wilde, and W.B. Yeats, whose works are placed in dialogue with authors who gained prominence during this period. Bringing women’s writing to the fore, Extraordinary Aesthetes rebalances the achievements of artists and writers during the rapidly transforming cultural world of the fin de siècle.

In her immensely readable and richly documented book, Christine Bayles Kortsch asks us to shift our understanding of late Victorian literary culture by examining its inextricable relationship with the material culture of dress and sewing. Even as the Education Acts of 1870, 1880, and 1891 extended the privilege of print literacy to greater numbers of the populace, stitching samplers continued to be a way of acculturating girls in both print literacy and what Kortsch terms "dress culture." Kortsch explores nineteenth-century women's education, sewing and needlework, mainstream fashion, alternative dress movements, working-class labor in the textile industry, and forms of social activism, showing how dual literacy in dress and print cultures linked women writers with their readers. Focusing on Victorian novels written between 1870 and 1900, Kortsch examines fiction by writers such as Olive Schreiner, Ella Hepworth Dixon, Margaret Oliphant, Sarah Grand, and Gertrude Dix, with attention to influential predecessors like Elizabeth Gaskell, Charlotte Brontë, and George Eliot. Periodicals, with their juxtaposition of journalism, fiction, and articles on dress and sewing are particularly fertile sites for exploring the close linkages between print and dress cultures. Informed by her examinations of costume collections in British and American museums, Kortsch's book broadens our view of New Woman fiction and its relationship both to dress culture and to contemporary women's fiction.

Oscar Wilde was a consumer modernist. His modernist aesthetics drove him into the heart of the mass culture industries of 1890s London, particularly the journalism and popular theatre industries. Wilde was extremely active in these industries: as a journalist at the Pall Mall Gazette; as magazine editor of the Women’s World; as commentator on dress and design through both of these; and finally as a fabulously popular playwright. Because of his desire to impact a mass audience, the primary elements of Wilde’s consumer aesthetic were superficial ornament and ephemeral public image – both of which he linked to the theatrical. This concern with the surface and with the ephemeral was, ironically, a foundational element of what became twentieth-century modernism – thus we can call Wilde’s aesthetic a consumer modernism, a root and branch of modernism that was largely erased.

Lucas Malet is one of a number of forgotten female writers whose work bridges the gap between George Eliot and Virginia Woolf. Malet’s writing was intrinsically linked to her passion for art. This is the first book-length study of Malet’s novels.

A collection of essays on women’s history and literary production at the turn of the twentieth century that centers the feminine phenomena. Analyzing such cultural practices as selling and shopping, political and social activism, urban field work and rural labor, radical discourses on feminine sexuality, and literary and artistic experimentation, this volume contributes to the rich vein of current feminist scholarship on the “gender of modernism” and challenges the assumption that modernism rose naturally or inevitably to the forefront of the cultural landscape at the turn of the twentieth century. During this period, “women’s experience” was a rallying cry for feminists, a unifying cause that allowed women to work together to effect social change and make claims for women’s rights. However, it also proved to be a source of great divisiveness among women, for claims about its universality quickly unraveled to reveal the classism, racism, and Eurocentrism of various feminist activities and organizations. The essays in this volume examine both literary and non-literary writings of Jane Addams, Djuna Barnes, Toru Dutt, Radclyffe Hall, H.D., Pauline Hopkins, Emma Dunham Kelley, Amy Levy, Alice Meynell, Bram Stoker, Ida B. Wells, Rebecca West, and others. Instead of focusing exclusively or even centrally on modernism and literature, these essays address a broad array of textual materials, from political pamphlets to gynecology textbooks, as they investigate women’s responses to the rise of commodity capitalism, middle-class women’s entrance into the labor force, the welfare state’s invasion of the working-class home, and the intensified eroticization of racial and class differences.

Invalid Modernism contributes to an intersectional moment in disability studies by looking at modernist aesthetics through a 'defamiliar body'. It also offers an intersectional understanding of modernism by studying the representation of physical and cognitive difference during a period marked by progressive reforms in health, labor, and welfare. Readings of texts by Henry James, Samuel Beckett, Virginia Woolf, William Carlos Williams, James Joyce, Djuna Barnes, Oscar Wilde, F.T. Marinetti, Jean Toomer, an opera by Alexander Zemlinsky, and paintings and constructions by dadaists and surrealists are set against the historical developments in sexology, medical discourse, and the pseudo-sciences of eugenics and anthropometry. Modernist works are well known for challenging formal features of narration and representation, but it is seldom observed that this challenge has often been enabled by figures of shell-shocked veterans, tubercular heroines, blind soothsayers, invalid aesthetes, and neurasthenic women. Such figures complicate an aesthetics of autonomy by which modernism is often understood. Since its evolution in the eighteenth century, aesthetics has been seen in terms of judgments based on detached appreciation. What begins as a highly privative, sensate response to an object or natural formation results in a disinterested judgment about the value of that response. By looking at modernist aesthetics through a disability optic, Invalid Modernism attempts to restore the missing body to aesthetics by disclosing a structure of feeling around dramatic changes in modernity. These changes are registered on and through the bodies and minds of figures considered in medical discourse of the period as 'invalid' citizens and subjects.