Women, Scholarship and Criticism: Gender and Knowledge, C.1790-1900

This volume brings together the varied artistic, critical and cultural productions by women scholars, critics and artists between 1790-1900, many of whom are little known in the canonical histories of the period. It looks at women working outside conventional canons, and are shown how they negotiated relationships with canonical forms of artistic production across the different disciplines, focusing in each case on the gendered associations and exclusions and the implied structures of sexual difference, which may or may not be revealed. Women discussed include authors like Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, Sydney Morgan and Anna Jameson, actresses such as Elizabeth Siddons, Dorothy Jordan, and Mary Robinson, women critics like Margaret Oliphant and Mary Cowden Clarke, historians such as Agnes Strickland, Lucy Aikin, Mary Anne Everett Green, Elizabeth Cooper and Lucy Toulmin Smith, the writers and readers of Women’s magazines, educationalists such as the Shiress sisters and translators like Anna Swanwick, as well as many others.