Literature and Politics

On the 26th of April 1885, Violet Paget wrote to her friend Frances Power Cobbe, about the reception of Miss Brown, Paget’s first novel which had been recently published under the pseudonym ‘Vernon Lee’. ‘The book has been almost universally stigmatised as a scandal production,’ she explained, ‘unfit for decent readers, and showing a most corrupt mind in the writer.’ Miss Brown provoked a spate of criticism which astounded its author in its two primary accusations: the first that the book was immoral, and the second that Lee had inappropriately chosen real-world celebrities as the poorly-concealed inspiration for her fictional characters. I suggest in this paper that Miss Brown was dismissed critically not because Vernon Lee chose to portray famous Pre-Raphaelite figures, but because of the implications of her representation. Lee’s depiction of her protagonist and heroine, largely inspired by Pre-Raphaelite poet-painter Dante Gabriel Rossetti and his wife and muse Elizabeth Siddal, positioned the aesthetic movement as one of degenerate sensuality, in which male misogynist artists degraded and objectified their female subjects. In critiquing the sexual politics of Pre-Raphaelite aestheticism, Lee’s novel was the first critical interpretation of Rossetti and Siddal’s relationship: an evaluation which was ahead of its time in pre-empting twentieth- and twenty-first-century readings of the limitations of aestheticism for women.

Angie Dunstan received her doctorate from the University of Sydney, where she is a researcher, tutor and sessional lecturer. She has published articles and book chapters on her Victorian research interests, including: the Pre-Raphaelite poet, painter and muse Elizabeth Siddal, the biographical writings of William Michael Rossetti, the nineteenth and twentieth century fictional and biographical legacies of Dante Gabriel Rossetti and William Morris, and Victorian visual and celebrity culture.