Unfolding the South: Nineteenth-Century British Women Writers and Artists in Italy (review)

While the imperatives and opportunities of empire caused many to leave nineteenth-century British shores, the increasing wealth of the middle classes, the decreasing cost of transport, the spread of railways, and the growth in forms of facilitated travel (such as guide books, organized tours, travel agencies) combined to produce an unprecedented rise in travel for leisure. Thus, a century that began, as Jane Austen's novels brilliantly attest, with women's mobility oppressively circumscribed concluded, according to John Pemble's The Mediterranean Passion: Victorians and Edwardians in the South (1987), with females outnumbering males as tourists in southern Europe (77). No longer dependent on the good offices of men, the mid-century British woman could now enjoy what Frances Cobbe termed, in her Essays on the Pursuits of Women (1863), the "freedom of locomotion" (51). In this brave new world, Italy, which had long been "portrayed as a dream-like haven" for male travelers, became "a utopian space for women as well" (Chapman and Stabler 4).

This volume of essays seeks to contribute to the growing body of work that has begun to map the place and significance of Italy—both as an imaginative construction and as a lived experience—for a range of nineteenth-century British women writers and artists. The editors write that this is a work born out of the happy recognition between colleagues of overlapping interests rather than the product of a galvanizing focus or thesis. As one might expect from such intellectual serendipity, however, the result is a collection of essays, many of considerable individual interest and merit, that is neither comprehensive nor especially coherent. Alison Chapman and Jane Stabler seek to make a virtue out of this disparateness by suggesting that the book offers a "complex diorama" of perspectives, unsettling conventional oppositions between north and south, birth and decay, fulfillment and failure, home and exile, liberation and constriction. They appeal to the legacy of Germaine de Staël's influential heroine Corinne as a unifying principle, arguing that the character provides "a conflicted paradigm of the inspired female artist" (1) that haunted all of the nineteenth-century artists and writers addressed in the book. Nevertheless, despite a useful general discussion of Corinne, the introduction cannot disguise the volume's fragmentation, because the relevance of de Staël's heroine to the various essays is uneven, and, more tellingly, the selection of women writers and artists for examination seems arbitrary and incomplete. The painter Marie Spartali Stillman, for example, is accorded an entire essay, whereas the sculptor Harriet Hosmer scarcely rates a mention. And while none could dispute the importance of Elizabeth Barrett Browning in this context, the allotment of three essays (and two of those to Casa Guidi Windows [1851]) out of a total of eleven to the one figure skews the representativeness of the collection.

Given the volume's determination to represent both canonical and noncanonical women, it is almost inevitable that there is a disjunction between those essays attempting a revaluation of established figures and those affecting a recovery of little-known figures and histories. Richard Bronin, for example, makes a compelling case in "Casa Guidi Windows: Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Italy and the poetry of citizenship" for reading Barrett Browning's poem as a sophisticated political study, offering a complex negotiation between past and present, detachment and engagement, and the individual and the state. Similarly, Isobel Armstrong, in "Casa Guidi Windows: spectacle and politics in 1851," provides a wide-ranging and often abstract discussion of the poetics of the window, theories of vision and light, and the place of the symbol in modernity, through a sometimes ingenious close reading of Barrett Browning's poem—one that is in many ways only tangentially relevant to the particular Italian context of the poem. Nicola Trott's scholarly and intricate reading of the problematics...