Victorian Women Writers and the Classics: The Feminine of Homer, and: George Eliot and the Discourses of Medievalism (review)

What are the distinctive means by which women writers and readers have encountered and appropriated ancient texts, themes and forms? The two studies reviewed here thoughtfully address this important question: Isobel Hurst’s Victorian Women Writers and the Classics, and Judith Johnston’s George Eliot and the Discourses of Medievalism. Both Hurst and Johnston offer well-informed and subtle commentaries on the unique and sometimes irreverent ways in which nineteenth-century English women writers received and re-authored tradition. Since the gendering of reception is a topic of debate in many fields, both of their books will make important contributions to scholarship beyond the discipline of Victorian literary studies.

Victorian Women Writers and the Classics belongs to the Oxford University Press ‘Classical Presences’ series, which is committed to charting the persistence of classical influences in post-classical literature and historiography. Other titles in the series cover a wide range of topics, from African rewritings of Greek tragedy to the twentieth-century reception of Homer in the literatures of Ireland, Yugoslavia, and well beyond. Hurst’s volume centres on Victorian England, though she does, on occasion, reach back into the Early Modern period and forward into the twentieth century. She argues that the classical tradition typically construed as a male prerogative was in fact influential for Victorian women writers, many of whom not only learned Greek and Latin, but also used this exceptional access to classical knowledge in order to contest the misogynistic and militaristic ethic it espoused. Over the course of six chapters – two broad surveys and four selective studies – Hurst accumulates a wealth of examples that establish the significance of the nineteenth-century woman classicist, both as a historical figure and as a fictional character. Throughout the book, she stresses documentary detail rather than textual analysis: she performs a few very insightful readings, but her foremost task is to reconstitute a macro-narrative of female classicism. Thus, Victorian Women Writers and the Classics lays the groundwork for a number of future concentrated investigations.

The first chapter provides an overview of the classics in Victorian England, especially their prominence in schools and universities where boys memorised and recited passages from Homer and Virgil with little regard for cultural or aesthetic value. As a result of this dull pedagogy, Hurst notes, the curriculum suffered – many students, like Lord Byron, felt alienated from the classics, whereas women who studied the classics without this emphasis on memorisation were spared such fatigue. The chapter also considers the ways in which knowledge of Greek and Roman literature reached a wider audience – including women readers – through translations, periodicals, anthologies, historical fiction and tourism. Chapter 2 examines the female classicist more fully, beginning with a consideration of the solitary student learning Latin and Greek from her father or brother at home, and continuing with an account of the increasing presence of women in academia throughout the century. Hurst’s scholarship is impeccable: her larger claims about women’s classical educations are firmly grounded in specific examples, such as those of Charlotte M. Yonge, Jane Ellen Harrison, and the so-called Girton Girls.

In the third chapter Hurst focuses on Elizabeth Barrett Browning, whose extraordinary knowledge of the classics was always guided by ‘a poetical rather than a scholarly career’ (101). Discussions of The Battle of Marathon, Aurora Leigh, and Casa Guidi Windows illustrate that Browning intervened in epic ‘tradition’ (as distinct from epic ‘genre’), in order to expose the inadequacy of its ‘martial’ values to the concerns of Victorian England, where ‘modern heroism’ took the form of ‘domestic life’ (114, 129). Chapter 4 looks to representations of the classics and domesticity in the Victorian novel – George Eliot’s reconfiguration of the relationship between Milton and his daughters in Middlemarch, for...