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Victorian Studies 43.2 (2001) 307-309



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Book Review

Names and Stories: Emilia Dilke and Victorian Culture


Names and Stories: Emilia Dilke and Victorian Culture, by Kali Israel; pp. ix + 367. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999, $45.00.

Kali Israel's Names and Stories contributes importantly to the nascent genre of historiographic biography. Alternately challenging and embracing the conventions of biography, Names and Stories offers a boldly interpretive account of the life and work of Emilia Dilke (1840-1904). The author's oscillation between straightforward narrative and self- conscious critique sets Names and Stories apart from conventional biography and places her work alongside such innovative texts as Toril Moi's Simone de Beauvoir: The Making of an Intellectual Woman (1994). Israel's compelling synthesis invites readers to reconsider the practice and subjects of biography while exploring Dilke's extraordinary life.

Dilke gained renown during her lifetime for her artistic, scholarly, political, and literary activities. She was widely mourned at her death, and obituaries detailing her career appeared throughout Europe and North America. Today she remains familiar [End Page 307] mainly through her association with Victorian luminaries of more enduring candescence. Dilke's correspondence reveals close professional and personal connections with John Ruskin, George Eliot, Robert Browning, Walter Pater, and Frederick Leighton, among others. Her marriages to two eminent Victorians--Oxford theologian Mark Pattison and Liberal MP Sir Charles Dilke--relegated her historical status to that of Mrs. Mark Pattison or Lady Dilke. Likewise, students of literary history know Dilke not as a successful fiction author but as the model on which Eliot based her Middlemarch (1871-72) heroine, Dorothea Brooke.

For her contemporaries, Dilke's prominence resulted as much from her accomplishments as her alliances. She published nine volumes on the history of art, two collections of short stories, a book on spiritual growth, and hundreds of critical reviews and essays. Her reputation as the foremost British expert on French art was matched by her position as a leading advocate for women's trade unions and universal suffrage. Dilke's multifarious career, combined with her visibility in noted Oxford and London social circles, ensured her a place in the annals of Victorian Britain as well as in its imagination.

That Dilke's life should generate scholarly as well as popular interest comes as no surprise. Indeed, aspects of her life have inspired responses ranging from the outlandishly fictional to the soberly academic. With Names and Stories, however, Dilke's life is treated for the first time as part of a sustained, historically aware, and critically self-conscious process of representation. Israel explains that Names and Stories "is not a biography or a 'life' of Emilia Dilke but an examination of the stories and texts that constitute her" (13). Toward this end, Israel announces her intent to explore various representations of Dilke's life and work as equally mediated and evidentiary. In this way, primary sources such as letters and diaries commingle with avowedly fictional narratives and scholarly texts. This discourse, both produced by and producing the historical figure Emilia Dilke, never presumes to know finally its subject. Even Dilke's name, which changed regularly throughout her life, puts into doubt the fixity of subjectivity and narrative. Born Emily Francis Strong and known as Francis during childhood, she became "Francesca" during her stint as a London art student; once married, she signed herself "E. F. S. Pattison"; toward the end of her first marriage, she anointed herself "Emilia" in correspondence with intimates; her second marriage brought her the title "Lady Dilke," by which she was known publicly until her death. Names, as Israel explains, "can be changed by choice and imagination, in secret decisions and intimate texts as well as by marital contracts, and they bear meanings beyond their legal status" (5). For this reason, Israel refers to Dilke by several names, including "Francis," "Pattison," "Dilke," and "Pattison/Dilke," in order to make manifest the multiplicity of her subjectivity.

Israel's attention to the process of naming acknowledges possibilities for self- fashioning while also recognizing the delimiting function that names serve...

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