Women and British Aestheticism, and: The Forgotten Female Aesthetes: Literary Culture in Late-Victorian England (review)

In her account of women writers in A Room of One's Own (1929) Virginia Woolf, in keeping with the dominant note of literary history, leapt from George Eliot to her contemporaries, leaving a gap of over half a century. Recent years have seen the straightening of the record as the New Woman fiction that burgeoned in the closing years of the nineteenth century has been restored to history. But, as Talia Schaffer and Kathy Alexis Psomiades note in their illuminating introduction to Women and British Aestheticism, feminist scholars' preference for politically active texts—a criterion which New Woman fiction fulfils more obviously than the work of female aesthetes—has led to their overlooking the important part played by aestheticism in women's self-definition in the early twentieth century.

Restoring to literary history such forgotten female aesthetes as Lucas Malet (Mary St. Leger Kingsley Harrison), Vernon Lee (Violet Paget), Alice Meynell, Margaret L. Woods, Ethel Lillian Voynich, Ouida (Marie Louise de la Ramée), Mary and Jane Findlater, Netta Syrett, and Mrs. Humphry Ward, and reconsidering writers usually categorized as New Women, such as George Egerton and Olive Schreiner, Women and British Aestheticism makes a major contribution to the history of women's writing. It also reshapes the category of aestheticism—long held to be the refuge of the dandy, and associated, most readily, with Oscar Wilde, Aubrey Beardsley, Arthur Symons, J. K. Huysmans, Ernest Dowson, Max Beerbohm, and Lionel Johnson—revealing women's involvement to have been far more widespread, controversial, and important than has hitherto been thought. Long understood to be a movement which urged the importance of art per se and believed in its ability to make life more beautiful, loosely connected to the phrase "art for art's sake" which hails, via Walter Pater in the late 1860s, to the Romantics, aestheticism has a masculine lineage and one which has, more specifically, privileged tragically short- lived male poets, neglecting legacies such as popular women's poetry of the 1820s and 1830s by Felicia Hemans and Letitia Landon that foregrounded women's emotional experience. Recent scholarship has established vital links between aestheticism and commodity culture (notably Regenia Gagnier's Idylls of the Marketplace: Oscar Wilde and the Victorian Public [1986] and Jonathan Freedman's Professions of Taste: Henry James, British Aestheticism, and Commodity Culture [1990]) and sexuality, (Richard Dellamora's Masculine Desire: The Sexual Politics of Victorian Aestheticism [1990]), highlighting its celebration of desire and non-normative sexuality. Ambitious in scope and meticulous in detail, Women and British Aestheticism builds on such predecessors to shed significant new light on the meaning and parameters of aestheticism, emphasizing ways in which it crossed and blurred the boundaries of high art and mass culture.

The fourteen essays are arranged in four themed sections. In section 1, which centres on fiction of the fin de siècle, Schaffer claims that the aesthetic novel was one of the central contributions women writers made to aestheticism, emerging as a significant alternative to New Womanism and naturalism. Lisa Hamilton shows how New Women writers shared interest in scientific ideas with the male aesthetes they criticized, and Annette R. Federico argues that the popular novel blended anti-elitism with aestheticism, allowing women to place themselves advantageously in the literary marketplace. In section 2 Psomiades, Linda K. Hughes, and Edward Marx develop a new genealogy for aestheticist poetry. Hughes shows how Rosamund Marriott Watson adapted the conventions of decadent poetry to counter decadent misogyny and Marx focuses on two late decadent women writers, Sarojini Naidu and Adela Nicolson (Laurence Hope), arguing for the need for a new, global contextualization. He records the opportunities aestheticism offered women from the colonies—either British settlers or...