This book examines women's art writing in the nineteenth century, challenging the idea of art history as a masculine intellectual field.

The ranks of English women writers rose steeply in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, contributing to the era’s revolutionary social movements as well as to transforming literary genres in prose and poetry. The phenomena of ‘the new’ — ‘New Women’, ‘New Unionism’, ‘New Imperialism’, ‘New Ethics’, ‘New Critics’, ‘New Journalism’, ‘New Man’ — are this moment’s touchstones. This book tracks the period's new social phenomena and unfolds its distinctively modern modes of writing. It provides expert introductions amid new insights into women’s writing throughout the United Kingdom and around the globe.

Since the late twentieth century, there has been a strategic campaign to recover the impact of Victorian women writers in the field of English literature. However, with the increased understanding of the importance of interdisciplinarity in the twenty-first century, there is a need to extend this campaign beyond literary studies in order to recognise the role of women writers across the nineteenth century, a time that was intrinsically interdisciplinary in approach to scholarly writing and public intellectual engagement.

This volume charts the rise of professional women writers across diverse fields of intellectual enquiry and through different modes of writing in the period immediately before and during the reign of Queen Victoria. It demonstrates how, between 1830 and 1880, the woman writer became an agent of cultural formation and contestation, appealing to and enabling the growth of female readership while issuing a challenge to the authority of male writers and critics. Of especial importance were changing definitions of marriage, family and nation, of class, and of morality as well as new conceptions of sexuality and gender, and of sympathy and sensation. The result is a richly textured account of a radical and complex process of feminization whereby formal innovations in the different modes of writing by women became central to the aesthetic, social, and political formation of British culture and society in the nineteenth century.

With the rise of mass tourism, Italy became increasingly accessible to Victorian women travellers not only as a locus of artistic culture but also as a site of political enquiry. Despite being outwardly denied a political voice in Britain, many female tourists were conspicuous in their commitment to the Italian campaign for national independence, or Risorgimento (1815–61). Revisiting Italy brings several previously unexamined travel accounts by women to light during a decisive period in this political campaign. Revealing the wider currency of the Risorgimento in British literature, Butler situates once-popular but now-marginalized writers: Clotilda Stisted, Janet Robertson, Mary Pasqualino, Selina Bunbury, Margaret Dunbar and Frances Minto Elliot alongside more prominent figures: the Shelley-Byron circle, the Brownings, Florence Nightingale and the Kemble sisters. Going beyond the travel book, she analyses a variety of forms of travel writing including unpublished letters, privately printed accounts and periodical serials. Revisiting Italy focuses on the convergence of political advocacy, gender ideologies, national identity and literary authority in women’s travel writing. Whether promoting nationalism through a maternal lens, politicizing the pilgrimage motif or reviving gothic representations of a revolutionary Italy, it identifies shared touristic discourses as temporally contingent, shaped by commercial pressures and the volatile political climate at home and abroad.

Vision and visual practices form a constant topic in the fiction of 19th-century American female authors. Based on Michel Foucault's assumption that an epistemic shift in the visual organisation of power and knowledge marks the onset of modernity and on developments in visual technology and philosophical reasoning, this study explores the ways in which issues of vision are addressed by American women writers before the ostensible 'visual turn' of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Authors such as Elizabeth Stoddard, Lousia May Alcott, Harriet Prescott Spofford, Metta Fuller Victor and Anna Katharine Green demonstrate a fundamental concern with the epistemological, social, and gender implications of visual practices. In their works, vision is exposed as a social and cultural practice, a means of power and control that structures social relations in gender-, class-, and race-specific ways. However, these authors also explore strategies of resistance and modes of empowerment through visual practices. 19th-century American women writers thus anticipate concerns that became dominant around the turn of the century and provide an important tradition upon which late 19th-century 'innovators' such as Edith Wharton and Henry James could build upon.

Contains articles which focus on a broad spectrum of significant figures in fiction, philosophy, and criticism such as Austen, Carlyle, Dickens,Thackeray, the Brontes, Tennyson, Browning, Arnold, Emerson, Hawthorne, Thoreau, Whitman, Twain, and Henry James.

British women writers of the 19th century were a remarkably talented, diverse, and prolific group. Some, such as Jane Austen and George Eliot, significantly contributed to the evolution of the English novel, while others, such as Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Christina Rossetti, are known for their poetry. And some, such as Marie Corelli, were enormously popular during their lifetimes but are now known primarily by scholars. This reference book is a guide to the lives and achievements of women writers of the period. Included are alphabetically arranged entries for more than 90 British women writers of the 19th century, ranging from the famous to the obscure. Each entry is written by an expert contributor and provides a brief biography, a discussion of major works and themes, an overview of the critical response to the writer's works, and a bibliography of primary and secondary sources, including web sites. The volume closes with a selected bibliography of anthologies and critical works.