Women Writing Art History in the Nineteenth Century

This book sets out to correct received accounts of the emergence of art history as a masculine field. It investigates the importance of female writers from Anna Jameson Elizabeth Eastlake and George Eliot to Alice Meynell Vernon Lee and Michael Field in developing a discourse of art notable for its complexity and cultural power its increasing professionalism and reach and its integration with other discourses of modernity. Proposing a more flexible and inclusive model of what constitutes art historical writing including fiction poetry and travel literature this book offers a radically revisionist account of the genealogy of a discipline and a profession. It shows how women experienced forms of professional exclusion that whilst detrimental to their careers could be aesthetically formative; how working from the margins of established institutional structures gave women the freedom to be audaciously experimental in their writing about art in ways that resonate with modern readers.