1st Edition
Women, Portraiture and the Crisis of Identity in Victorian England My Lady Scandalous Reconsidered
By Colleen Denney
Copyright 2009
274 Pages
by
Routledge
274 Pages
by
Routledge
Exploring the concept of portrait as memoir, Women, Portraiture and the Crisis of Identity in Victorian England: My Lady Scandalous Reconsidered examines the images and lives of four prominent Victorian women who steered their way through scandal to forge unique identities. The volume shows the effect of celebrity, and even notoriety, on the lives of Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Lady Dilke, Millicent... Read more
Contents: Preface; Introduction: portraying smart women: scandalous revelations; Part 1 Victorian Scandals and Visual Tools of Persuasion: 'Sex, money and dirt': Mary Elizabeth Braddon, William Powell Frith, and the business of respectability; Victorian scandals and desperate political wives: a case study of Lady Dilke. Part 2 Challenging the Status Quo: A Woman's Modern Identity Formation as a Site of Resistance: 'Voiceless London': Millicent Garrett Fawcett's embodiment of the common cause or, resisting the scandal of the platform; Sarah Grand and the scandal of the new woman novelist; The scandal of the feminist woman at the fin de siècle: cultural critique in Oscar Wilde's play An Ideal Husband (1895); Bibliography; Index.
Biography
Colleen Denney is a Professor of Art History in the Women's Studies Program at the University of Wyoming, where she also holds an adjunct position in the Art Department. She counts many scandalous women among her closest friends. Like one of her subjects, Sarah Grand, she is an avid cyclist.
