Victorian Women Writers and the Classics

Abstract

This book brings together two lines of enquiry in recent criticism: the reception of ancient Greece and Rome, and women as writers and readers in the 19th century. A classical education has been characterized as almost an exclusively male prerogative, but women writers had a greater imaginative engagement with classical literature than has previously been acknowledged. To offer a more accurate impression of the influence of the classics in Victorian women's literary culture, women's difficulties in gaining access to classical learning are explored through biographical and fictional representations of the development of women's education from solitary study at home to compulsory classics at university. The restrictions which applied to women's classical learning liberated them from the repressive and sometimes alienating effects of a traditional classical education, enabling women writers to produce distinctive literary responses to the classical tradition. Women readers focused on image, plot, and character rather than grammar, leading to imaginative and often subversive reworkings of classical texts. Elizabeth Barrett Browning and George Eliot have been granted an exceptional status as 19th-century female classicists. This book places them in a literary tradition in which revising classical narratives in forms such as the novel and the dramatic monologue offered women the opportunity to express controversial ideas. The reworking of classical texts serves a variety of purposes: to validate women's claims to authorship, to demand access to education, to highlight feminist issues through the heroines of ancient tragedy, and to repudiate the warrior ethos of ancient epic.

The Reception of Ancient Greece and Rome in the Victorian Period

“…22 In the second half of the century, girls' schools also began to offer formal education, including Latin for some students and Greek for the elite. 23 The exclusivity of Greek was associated with "intellectual ambition and the values that are attached to the intellectual lifestyle; [. .…”

A ‘Distinctive’ Map of London: Women, Theatre and the Classics in 1893

“…18 Nevertheless, she only cursorily considers the links between women, drama and the Classics through the Greek Plays performed in women's colleges during the late nineteenth century where women, she claims, 'were initially active in the production of classical drama'. 19 The performance of Classics at women's colleges indeed meant a turning point for the 'institutionalized exclusion' of women in the classical tradition argued by Fowler; however, this was by no means the first time women were producing classically inspired spectacles during the century. 20 Cassandra, a monodrama by Elizabeth Cobbold that was first performed at the European Saloon in London in 1821 and Mrs Warton's classically inspired shows at the 'Walhalla' in the 1840s are two earlier examples.…”