The Forgotten Female Aesthetes: Literary Culture in Late-Victorian England

Abstract

The Forgotten Female Aesthetes: Literary Culture in Late-Victorian England. By Talia Schaffer. (Victorian Literature and Culture) Charlottesville and London: University Press of Virginia. 2000. x + 298 pp. $55 (paperbound $19.50). Until quite recently Victorian aestheticism has been seen as the preserve of male writers with Wilde, Pater, Beardsley, and the poets of the 1890s as chief actors, but new scholarship has begun to recover the important part played by women. Following on from the illuminating collection Women and British Aestheticism (Charlottesville and London: University Press of Virginia, 2000) which she edited with Kathy Alexis Psomiades, Talia Schaffer recovers a number of women writers, highly celebrated in their day, and considers their diverse contributions to aesthetic literature and culture. In an excellent first chapter Schaffer considers the loose meaning of the term `aestheticism' and gives careful consideration to why female aesthetes have been excluded from the canon. One reason for this is that the first historians of aesthetic culture were male aesthetes who `constructed a story of aestheticism that centered on their own and their friends' achievements'; another that aestheticism has been too easily conflated with decadence, `a brief defensive reaction of embattled elite male writers' (p. 6). Schaffer usefully points out that various of the women she examines such as Ouida, Lucas Malet, and Alice Meynell were considered the equals of Wilde, Hardy, James, and Beerbohm. She argues that because male aesthetes tended to work on poetry, essays, and drama, this promoted the notion that there were few `aesthetic' novels, whereas in fact the novel was a form favoured by female aesthetes. Unsurprisingly, women's achievements in this field went unremarked by subsequent historians of male aesthetic culture. Schaffer also devotes some time to explaining the differences between female aesthetes and the (now) better known New Woman writers and shows that we cannot simply judge the aesthetes' lack of apparent political commitment to causes such as female suffrage as antifeminist. One of her major arguments is that women used the artifice of highly mannered aesthetic style to camouflage treatment of subjects that would otherwise be taboo. Schaffer's second chapter explores how the female aesthetes `wrote in a particular context: a crisis of realism' and suggests that `the extensive body of experimental women's writing of the late nineteenth century' (p. 34) is a result of women's attraction to aestheticism, which offered subject matters other than the traditional marriage-plot. …