Victorian Women Writers and the Classics

Isobel Hurst examines the role of women writers in the Victorian reception of ancient Greece and Rome showing that they had a greater imaginative engagement with classical literature than has previously been acknowledged. The restrictions which applied to women''s access to classical learning liberated them from the repressive and sometimes alienating effects of a traditional classical education. Women writers'' reworkings of classical texts serve a variety of purposes: to validate women''s claims to authorship to demand access to education to highlight feminist issues through the heroines of ancient tragedy to repudiate the warrior ethos of ancient epic.