What is a Woman to Do?

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.

Kyriaki Hadjiafxendi is Lecturer in Victorian Literature and Culture at the University of Stirling. Her publications include the co-edited collection Authorship in Context: From the Theoretical to the Material (2007). She is currently working on a monograph on George Eliot, the nineteenth-century literary marketplace and sympathy. Patricia Zakreski is a Teaching Fellow in the Department of English at the University of Exeter. She is the author of Representing Female Artistic Labour: Refining Work for the Middle-Class Woman (2006). Her current project concerns the relationship between nineteenth-century industrial design and women’s writing.

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