Wearing it lightly? Writers, writing and the educated woman in nineteenth century portraiture

Abstract

Portraits of Victorian women authors have been of tremendous interest both to literary scholars and to art historians. They are among the most treasured souvenirs of remarkable women’s lives, and fascinating evidence of how Victorian writers negotiated the difficult business of forging an appropriate public identity in the context of the burgeoning Victorian literary industry – an industry which women entered in unprecedented numbers. The painted, drawn and photographic portraits of three different writers - Elizabeth Gaskell, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, and Agnes Strickland - are examined in relation to the iconographic traditions of representing learned women, and in relation to the processes of circulation by which images of authors entered (or not) the public sphere.