Patricia Zakreski's interdisciplinary study draws on fiction, prose, painting, and the periodical press to expand and redefine our understanding of women's relationship to paid work during the Victorian period. While the idea of 'separate spheres' has largely gone uncontested by feminist critics studying female labour during the nineteenth century, Zakreski challenges this distinction by showing that the divisions between public and private were, in fact, surprisingly flexible, with homes described as workplaces and workplaces as homes. By combining art with forms of industrial or mass production in representations of the respectable woman worker, writers projected a form of paid creative work that was not violated or profaned by the public world of the market in which it was traded. Looking specifically at sewing, art, writing, and acting, Zakreski shows how these professions increasingly came to be defined as 'artistic' and thus as suitable professions for middle-class women, and argues that the supposedly degrading activity of paid work could be transformed into a refining experience for women. Rather than consigning working women to the margins of patriarchal culture, then, her study shows how representations of creative women, by authors such as Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Dinah Craik, Charles Dickens, Anthony Trollope, and Charlotte Yonge, participated in and shaped new forms of mainstream culture.

This book constitutes the first comprehensive history of the network of women who worked at the heart of the English Arts and Crafts movement from the 1870s to the 1930s. Challenging the long-standing assumption that the Arts and Crafts simply revolved around celebrated male designers like William Morris, it instead offers a new social and cultural account of the movement, which simultaneously reveals the breadth of the imprint of women art workers upon the making of modern society. Thomas provides unprecedented insight into how women navigated authoritative roles as 'art workers' by asserting expertise across a range of interconnected cultures: from the artistic to the professional, intellectual, entrepreneurial and domestic. Through examination of newly discovered institutional archives and private papers, Thomas elucidates the critical importance of the spaces around which women conceptualised alternative creative and professional lifestyles.

This book provides a necessary critical reappraisal of one of the most challenging and subversive of nineteenth-century women writers.

Women, Art and Money in England establishes the importance of women artists' commercial dealings to their professional identities and reputations in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Grounded in economic, social and art history, the book draws on and synthesises data from a broad range of documentary and archival sources to present a comprehensive history of women artists' professional status and business relationships within the complex and changing art market of late-Victorian England. By providing new insights into the routines and incomes of women artists, and the spaces where they created, exhibited and sold their art, this book challenges established ideas about what women had to do to be considered 'professional' artists. More important than a Royal Academy education or membership to exhibiting societies was a woman's ability to sell her work. This meant that women had strong incentive to paint in saleable, popular and 'middlebrow' genres, which reinforced prejudices towards women's 'naturally' inferior artistic ability – prejudices that continued far into the twentieth century. From shining a light on the difficult to trace pecuniary arrangements of little researched artists like Ethel Mortlock to offering new and direct comparisons between the incomes earned by male and female artists, and the genres, commissions and exhibitions that earned women the most money, Women, Art and Money is a timely contribution to the history of women's working lives that is relevant to a number of scholarly disciplines.

The Routledge Companion to Literature and Feminism brings unique literary, critical, and historical perspectives to the relationship between women’s writing and women’s rights in British contexts from the late eighteenth century to the present. Thematically organised around five central concepts—Rights, Networks, Bodies, Production, and Activism—the Companion tracks vital questions and debates, offering fresh perspectives on changing priorities and enduring continuities in relation to women’s ongoing struggle for liberty and equality. This groundbreaking collection brings into focus the historical and cultural conditions which have shaped the formation of British literary feminisms, including the legacies of slavery, colonialism, and Empire. From the political novel of the 1790s to early twentieth-century suffrage theatre and contemporary ecofeminism, and from the mid-Victorian antislavery movement to anti-fascist activism in the 1930s and working-class women’s writing groups in the 1980s, this book testifies to the diverse and dynamic character of the relationship between literature and feminism. Featuring contributions from leading feminist scholars, the Companion offers new insights into the crucial role played by women’s literary production in the evolving history of women’s rights discourses, feminist activism, and movements for gender equality. It will appeal to students and scholars in the fields of women’s writing, British literature, cultural history, and gender and feminist studies.

Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Pre-Raphaelite extraordinaire, is unique as Victorian proto-expressionistic painter-poet, who relentlessly sought representation of a tormented personified-self through the communicative relationship between image and word. In this interdisciplinary study is considered the narrative interaction that unifies ideas and forms into a self-expressive dialectical that informs of autonomous individualism and gender politics as a social problematic. Rossetti, known universally as a charismatic and vibrantly passionate man, is tangibly revealed in the most tenderly transparent narratives to be a haunted and socially subjugated man who searched for self-definition as a man and as an artist. By an intricate analysis of key textual and visual narratives Yildiz Kilic provides an insightful and wholly original interpretation of Rossetti as Victorian victim and innovator.

Yiddish and Hebrew writer I. L. Peretz (1852–1915) was a major leader of Eastern European Jewry in the years prior to World War I, and was deeply involved in Jewish politics and communal life throughout his lifetime. In The Radical Isaac, Adi Mahalel examines a central part of his life and art that has often been neglected, namely, his close alignment with the needs of the Jewish working-class and his deep devotion to progressive politics. Although there have been numerous studies of Peretz and his work, this very central component of his life nonetheless remains severely understudied. By offering close readings of the "radical" Peretz, Mahalel recasts the way political activism is understood in scholarly evaluations of the writer's work. Employing a partly chronological, partly thematic scheme, Mahalel follows Peretz's radicalism from its inception and then through the various ways in which it was synchronically expressed during this intense period of history.

A novel investigation into art pedagogy and constructions of national identities in Britain and Ireland, this collection explores the student-master relationship in case studies ranging chronologically from 1770 to 2013, and geographically over the national art schools of England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales. Essays explore the manner in which the Old Masters were deployed in education; fuelled the individual creativity of art teachers and students; were used as a rhetorical tool for promoting cultural projects in the core and periphery of the British Isles; and united as well as divided opinions in response to changing expectations in discourse on art and education. Case studies examined in this book include the sophisticated tradition of 'academic' inquiry of establishment figures, like Joshua Reynolds and Frederic Leighton, as well as examples of radical reform undertaken by key individuals in the history of art education, such as Edward Poynter and William Coldstream. The role of 'Modern Masters' (like William Orpen, Augustus John, Gwen John and Jeff Wall) is also discussed along with the need for students and teachers to master the realm of art theory in their studio-based learning environments, and the ultimate pedagogical repercussions of postmodern assaults on the academic bastions of the Old Masters.

This anthology contributes to a scholarly understanding of the aesthetics and economics of female artistic labour in the Victorian period. It maps out the evolution of the Woman Question in a number of areas, including the status and suitability of artistic professions for women, their engagement with new forms of work and their changing relationship to the public sphere. The wealth of material gathered here - from autobiographies, conduct manuals, diaries, periodical articles, prefaces and travelogues - traces the extensive debate on women's art, feminism and economics from the 1830s to the 1890s. Combining for the first time nineteenth-century criticism on literature and the visual arts, performance and craftsmanship, the selected material reveals the different ideological positions surrounding the transition of women from idleness to serious occupation. The distinctive primary sources explore the impact of artistic labour upon perceptions of feminine sensibility and aesthetics, the conflicting views of women towards the pragmatics of their own creative labour as they encompassed vocations, trades and professions, and the complex relationship between paid labour and female fame and notoriety.

Louise Jopling: A Biographical and Cultural Study is the first in-depth study of this nineteenth-century painter who was among the first women admitted to the Royal Society of British Artists (in 1902). In part an engaging biography of a compelling celebrity figure and social campaigner in Victorian England, Patricia de Montfort?s book interweaves a vivid and rounded portrait of this Manchester-born artist, teacher, and author with insightful analysis of Jopling?s artwork and the aristocratic-bohemian social milieu that she inhabited. Painted by Whistler and Millais, Jopling herself portrayed Victorian-era celebrities like the actress Lillie Langtry and her patrons included members of the de Rothschild banking family. Her work also included figure compositions, interiors, landscape and genre scenes. Drawing upon Jopling's unpublished diaries, notebooks and correspondence as well as her 1925 memoir Twenty Years of My Life, de Montfort?s study opens the way for a twenty-first century rediscovery of this now little-known artist, who combined professional artistic practice with social activism, against the backdrop of an often troubled private life. The full scope of Jopling?s artistic endeavours are discussed in relation to the cultural framework for fin de si?e working women, as are her progressive views on education and women?s suffrage.