The Forgotten Female Aesthetes: Literary Culture in Late-Victorian England.(Review)

Publication: CLIO

Publication Date: 22-MAR-01

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COPYRIGHT 2001 Indiana University, Purdue University of Fort Wayne

The Forgotten Female Aesthetes: Literary Culture in Late-Victorian England. By Talia Schaffer. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2000. 298 pages.

Talia Schaffer's study of female aestheticism is a welcome addition to an increasing number of studies which challenge our understanding of the fin-de-siecle and modernism. Schaffer locates an alternate aestheticism in the Woman's World, a periodical founded by Oscar Wilde that competed with the better-known Yellow Book and that represented a strain of aestheticism that was "popular, based in material culture, and interested in alternative gender behaviors" (2). Exploring the careers and the writing of women who contributed to Woman's World and to the 1890s aesthetic movement in general, Schaffer contends that aestheticism was "an already feminized realm" and that during the fin-de-siecle and the early twentieth century, every "now-canonical male aesthete once competed with the female aesthetes whose critical and popular success made them formidable contemporaries" (2). As Schaffer rightly points out, an examination and recovery of this "missing half of aestheticism" alters our understanding of the movement.

Schaffer focuses on the pervasiveness of female aesthetic ideas and practices throughout the literary culture at large, and she offers her meticulously researched theories and suggestions as to why many prominent authors, including Oscar Wilde, Virginia Woolf, Thomas Hardy, and Henry James, worked to disassociate themselves from female aesthetes, despite their indebtedness to them. Hence, Schaffer's uncovering of this alternative aestheticism reads somewhat dramatically, and her use of ghostly and haunting metaphors throughout the book adds to that drama.

In chapters one and two, Schaffer discusses how a distinct, female aestheticism originated out of resistance to the hegemony of realism and the marriage plot in particular. Essentially prohibited from entering the masculine domain of naturalism (although some women writers did dare to attempt to write naturalist novels), and yet unwilling to identify themselves with the New Women authors who also challenged traditional...

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