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It has been suggested that women were broadly excluded from the art world of the eighteenth century because of prevailing views on female taste, which considered them incapable of appreciating high art. Satirical representations of women spectators suggest a vulgar mode of art-viewing, associated with a preference for gaudy colour and excessive finish, and for portraiture over history painting, reversing the academic canon. A survey of periodicals reveals that such stereotypes persisted throughout the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. However, my investigation of women's writing on art between 1780 and 1860 indicates the extent of their involvement in the art world. Initially through travel-writing, and across an increasingly wide range of genres, women published a wealth of material on art, ranging from popular handbooks and painting manuals to scholarly treatises. This study is the first to focus on these largely neglected texts as a collective body of work, and to demonstrate women's sophisticated engagement with contemporary and historical art in this period. Through their social networks, travel, meticulous research and self-presentation as 'proper' women writers, individuals such as Maria Graham (Lady Calicott), Anna Jameson, Mary Philadelphia Merrifield and Elizabeth Rigby (Lady Eastlake) built up a public reputation, despite their unofficial status. Far from being merely industrious 'compilers', these women were in the vanguard of changes in taste, through their promotion of the Primitives and of German connoisseurship, and their iconographical studies. I investigate how these largely self-educated amateurs established their authority, and how their writing negotiated negative perceptions of the female viewer. I show that the strategies they employed were determined as much by their class, education and religion, as by their sex. Given the high praise these writers received from reviewers, artists and fellow connoisseurs, I argue that it was possible to perceive women's taste far more positively than the satirical stereotypes suggest. This thesis offers a substantial reassessment of the scale and nature of women's contribution to the evolving discipline of art history in the early Victorian period.

This thesis takes as its starting point Chandra Talpade Mohanty’s argument that it is the way in which “Third World” women’s narratives are read and understood that is crucial, together with the need to locate them contextually. My original contribution to knowledge is to develop a deconstructive, cultural analysis through the re–reading of a selection of core postcolonial women’s texts written in former colonial societies, at a time prior to the full emergence of postcolonialism as a set of theoretical concepts and before feminism had developed its major contribution to academic scholarship. These theories are examined in the first three chapters of the thesis. This re–reading is of texts which arguably prefigured in many ways some of the main debates later articulated in postcolonial feminist criticism, thus (re–)interpreting them through a contemporary, critical lens. The objective of the textual analysis, among other things, is to underline the function of literary mapping in postcolonial women’s writing and the ways in which this resonates with key issues in postcolonial feminist studies. For example, the texts subvert the figure of the “universal woman” challenged by several critics, undermine images of women’s sameness, and transform marginalising spaces such as prison and home into sites of possible resistance. Overall, the main contribution of this thesis is twofold. Firstly, the interpretation of postcolonial women’s writing as a metachronous discourse of literary mapping in order to reclaim rather than deny the difference and complexity inherent in women’s texts and identities. This lends a wider dimension to the literary representations of women and justifies my attempt to order the texts as following an inverted rite of passage. Secondly, this thesis demonstrates that postcolonial women’s writing constitutes a discourse of literary activism and a cultural archive of prismatic female narratives which demands a responsive reading of the texts. This is to form a collective, critical consciousness from which, it is hoped, present and future communities of women can learn to change their lives.

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MA (English Literature) / Department of English / See the attached abstract below