Women Writing Art History in the Nineteenth Century

Abstract

This book sets out to correct received accounts of the emergence of art history as a masculine field. It investigates the importance of female writers from Anna Jameson, Elizabeth Eastlake and George Eliot to Alice Meynell, Vernon Lee and Michael Field in developing a discourse of art notable for its complexity and cultural power, its increasing professionalism and reach, and its integration with other discourses of modernity. Proposing a more flexible and inclusive model of what constitutes art historical writing, including fiction, poetry and travel literature, this book offers a radically revisionist account of the genealogy of a discipline and a profession. It shows how women experienced forms of professional exclusion that, whilst detrimental to their careers, could be aesthetically formative; how working from the margins of established institutional structures gave women the freedom to be audaciously experimental in their writing about art in ways that resonate with modern readers.

Voicing the Queer Self: Listening to Portraits with Vernon Lee

“…Hilary Fraser has urged us to consider that: fiction offered an alternative medium of expression to the more ideologically circumscribed discourse of art history, one that enabled women to rehearse with greater freedom issues relating not only to the gender politics of their profession and the writing of art's histories, but to sexuality, visuality and intersubjectivity. 93 At a time in which queerness could be visually policed and pathologically codified, and the homosexual was spoken for in the clinical patterns proffered by sexologists, Lee's curiosity for resonance indicates to art historians that the voice complicates the elision of seeing and knowing on which we often base our understanding of gender and sexuality.…”

“The Greatest Living Critic”: Christiana Herringham and the Practice of Connoisseurship

“…As Hilary Fraser has noted, this was a quality Eastlake had highlighted in her predecessor Anna Jameson (1794-1860) and one which was not beyond the reach of female art historians. 18 Herringham was similarly renowned for her attention to detail, but, in the decade after Eastlake's death, she established a "scientific" expertise that combined meticulous observation, empirical research and painstaking reproduction of works of art. Herringham's career reveals that art journalism and cultural organisations were not entirely closed to women in the late-Victorian and Edwardian period.…”