Women and the art of fiction

Women wrote about art in the nineteenth century in a variety of genres, ranging from the formal historical or technical treatise and professional art journalism, to travel writing, poetry, and fiction. Their fiction is often less ideologically circumscribed than their formal art histories: the visual arts constituted a language for writing about the social position of women, and about questions of gender and sexuality. This essay considers how women introduced the visual arts and artist figures into their fiction in critically distinctive ways, and can be said in this form to have contributed to nineteenth-century art discourse and debate

Review of Gender and the Victorian Periodical

\u27We are dominated by Journalism\u27 \u27a really remarkable power\u27, Oscar Wilde observed, not entirely neutrally, in \u27The Soul of Man under Socialism\u27 published in the Fortnightly Review in 1891. Like many of his contemporaries, Wilde recognized not only the power of the press, but also its modernity. In this wide ranging and important study Hilary Fraser, Stephanie Green and Judith Johnston argue that precisely because of its power the periodical press occupied a central position in the construction of gender in Victorian cultural history. Journalism was gendered masculine by those who accorded it a lofty status within the profession of letters, they suggest. It was just as insistently gendered feminine by those who denigrated writing for the press. Hence Matthew Arnold\u27s description of the so-called \u27New Journalism\u27 in 1887 as \u27full of ability, novelty, variety, sensation, sympathy, generous instincts; its one great fault is that it is featherbrained\u27, - all attributes conventionally associated with women. Ironically the increasing number of women who joined the ranks of journalists as the century progressed served to downgrade the periodical press still further, by emphasizing its femininity. But for emerging writers like Marian Evans, Harriet Martineau, Margaret Oliphant and Eliza Lynn Linton earlier in the century the press provided a platform from which their careers were launched. Just as anonymity permitted men \u27never meant for authors\u27 to enter the writing profession, it gave women with literary ambitions an opportunity to write for publication. Fraser and Johnston quote Daniel Brown\u27s comment that the periodical essay became \u27the Trojan horse that allowed women writers to enter the male preserve of professional writing\u27. And their male counterparts were aware of their arrival. G. H. Lewes\u27s article \u27The Condition of Authors in England, Germany and France\u27 (1847) despite its jocular tone, reveals anxiety about the infiltration of the masculine writing profession by \u27speculators\u27 - \u27women, children, and ill-trained troops\u27. A subsequent article in The Leader, \u27A Gentle Hint to Writing Women\u27 (1850), continued the military metaphor, claiming that \u27women have made an invasion of our legitimate domain\u27 - \u27they are ruining our profession\u27 - \u27My idea of a perfect woman\u27, the article concludes, \u27is of one who can write but won\u27t\u27 , an unexpected comment, as the authors observe, by the man who was to become George Eliot\u27s consort

Women and the modelling of Victorian sculptural discourse

This article focuses on a selection of nineteenth-century female art critics and connoisseurs who were prominent art writers of their day but whose contribution to the critical history of sculpture has since fallen out of view. I argue that women modeled a sculptural discourse that was distinctive, often personally driven and biographically inflected, and gendered. They deployed various forms of life writing – biography, autobiography, memoir, personal reminiscence, Bildungsroman, letters, gallery journals – as a vehicle for connoisseurship about sculpture. Cosmopolitan in outlook, they understood the importance of personal networks in both the production and the reception of art. Furthermore, female writers responded to the corporeal connections between viewers, models and figurative sculpture in their work. Writing about the three-dimensional representation of the human body in sculptural form enabled women to comment obliquely on issues such as female creativity, sexuality and education

Grief encounter: the language of mourning in Fin-de-Siècle sculpture

Herder’s Sculpture: Some Observations on Shape and Form from Pygmalion’s Creative Dream, first published in 1778 under the title Plastik, makes a crucial intervention in the history of aesthetics. Where Lessing, in Laocoön (1766), had distinguished between the arts on the basis of the spatial or temporal arrangement of their constitutive semiotic elements, Herder’s analysis of the differences between the arts turns, as his modern editor Jason Gaiger notes, on ‘their specific modes of “address”’. As an art of relief and depth, Herder argues, sculpture demands haptic engagement; ‘for what are properties of bodies’, he asks, ‘if not relations to our own body, to our sense of touch?’ As the invocation of Pygmalion’s creative dream in Herder’s subtitle implies, the ability to grasp a sculptural form can bring it to life: ‘the sculpture lives and his soul feels that it lives’. Herder’s essay provides a conceptual framework and historical grounding for my own experiment in synaesthesia as embodied practice, one that reaches back to late nineteenth-century art writing and sculpture to frame and comprehend a modern encounter. But, I argue, contrary to the promise of animation offered by the Pygmalion myth, memorial sculpture is poignantly resistant to the possibility of coming to life, however vital the feelings of the contemplative lover. Engaging with Herder, and inscribing my encounters with sculptures by Auguste Rodin and Edward Onslow Ford within a fin-de-siècle tradition of feeling, this essay proposes an anti-Pygmalion counter-myth for the origins of sculpture as a medium of mourning

A Tale of the Unknown Unknowns

The site of Warren Field in Scotland revealed two unusual and enigmatic features; an alignment of pits and a large, rectangular feature interpreted as a timber building. Excavations confirmed that the timber structure was an early Neolithic building and that the pits had been in use from the Mesolithic. This report details the excavations and reveals that the hall was associated with the storage and or consumption of cereals, including bread wheat, and pollen evidence suggests that the hall may have been part of a larger area of activity involving cereal cultivation and processing. The pits are fully documented and environmental evidence sheds light on the surrounding landscape