Victorian heroines : representations of femininity in nineteenth-century literature and art /

In this provocative feminist interpretation of the Victorian heroine, Reynolds and Humble postulate a traditional dichotomy between the "angel in the house" and the sexually aware--and therefore depraved--woman, only to offer a revisionist reading: that women with explicitly erotic sensibilities were protagonists in the fiction of Charlotte Bront"e, Braddon, Eliot, and Collins, and subjects in paintings by Alma-Tadema, Leighton, and Albert Moore, among others. So lightweight a "straw woman" is easy to knock down; yet there is merit in their reading, which compels readers to feel the impact of Victorian feminine sensuality. The authors are equally tendentious in reading masculine autobiography as bildungsroman but feminine autobiography as less egocentric and linear. No short work can encompass the Victorian, of course, but this book disregards both recent scholarship--e.g., Richard Jenkyns's Dignity and Decadence (CH, Nov'92)--as to neoclassicism and femininity, and major primary sources (e.g., Thackeray, Trollope, Christina Rossetti, and periodical literature). The reader must also cope with misspellings, a miscounting of Collins's children, and a reversed cover illustration. Advanced undergraduate; graduate; faculty. D. Rutenberg; University of South Florida