Art and Womanhood in Fin-de-Siècle Writing: The Fiction of Lucas Malet, 1880–1931 by Catherine Delyfer (review)

In this volume, the sixth in the “Gender and Genre” series edited by Ann Heilmann, Catherine Delyfer continues the important feminist work of recovering once-popular and influential female writers, making a compelling case for Lucas Malet as a figure worthy of such recovery. Delyfer has previously published on Malet’s better-known contemporary, the female aesthete Vernon Lee, as well as on the fin-de-siècle decorative arts periodical The Studio. In this book, Delyfer successfully demonstrates the literary and textual sophistication of Malet’s oeuvre by illuminating its narrative complexity. She also describes Malet’s engagement with canonical writers—including Henry James, Thomas Hardy, George Eliot, Émile Zola, and Virginia Woolf—and places her more broadly within the literary, aesthetic, and social debates of her time.

Lucas Malet was the pseudonym of Mary St. Leger Kingsley Harrison, daughter of Charles Kingsley and cousin of Mary Kingsley. A promising painting student at London’s Slade School of Art prior to her marriage in 1875, Malet subsequently exchanged painting for writing but retained strong connections to the art world. Her literary career followed a trajectory familiar to those who study late Victorian women writers: it spanned decades (here an impressive fifty years) and included at least seventeen novels and many shorter works, achieving great popularity and critical acclaim but ending in obscurity and penury. Malet’s fiction is fascinating for its bold treatment of radical themes, including infidelity, lesbianism, masochism, incest, disability, and prostitution. It is also notable for its “sustained tactical use of visual tropes, colour, paintings, and artworks” as “a method for disrupting narrative structure, conveying dislocated points of view and corroding accepted representations of social roles,” particularly where gender is concerned (4–5). Delyfer follows Talia Schaffer in arguing that Malet is a “bridge, one of the missing links, between the generation of Eliot and that of Woolf” (151).

Apart from Schaffer’s scholarship, Malet has received little critical attention. While Delyfer is frequently in conversation with Schaffer, her contributions differ significantly, focusing less on Malet’s relation to more canonical male writers or to aestheticism and more on her use of visual tropes and her slow development across late Victorian, fin-de-siècle, and modernist contexts. The only other book-length study of Malet is a literary biography, Patricia Lorimer Lundberg’s “An Inward Necessity”: The Writer’s Life of Lucas Malet (2003). Thus Delyfer invites readers to explore a body of fiction ripe for further study, excavation work enabled by the recent availability of Malet’s fiction as open-source e-texts.

One of the strengths of Delyfer’s study is that she chooses to focus her analysis on four key texts; this allows ample space for close reading and for developing their aesthetic framework. She selects two texts that bookend Malet’s career along with two of her most well-known novels (both “Books of the Year” from the fin de siècle), and this structure effectively conveys the shape of Malet’s development as a writer across half a century and a radically changed literary scene. Each chapter reads its central text with a focus on the ways that the language and representation of visual art layer and disrupt the surface text. Thus Delyfer highlights the role of artistic objects, symbolic and allusive; of artists, practicing and aspirant, along with their subjects; and of specularity and its refusal, the dynamics of gazing, framing, and obscuring.

The first chapter examines Malet’s first novel, Mrs. Lorimer (1882), the story of a woman whose ongoing struggle with the limited roles available to late Victorian women will appeal to twenty-first-century readers. Here Delyfer attends to the ways that Malet both uses sketches as symbolic objects and validates sketching as an aesthetic for literary and visual art. The second chapter treats The Wages...