ABSTRACT

Over the course of the nineteenth century, women in Britain participated in diverse and prolific forms of artistic labour. As they created objects and commodities that blurred the boundaries between domestic and fine art production, they crafted subjectivities for themselves as creative workers. By bringing together work by scholars of literature, painting, music, craft and the plastic arts, this collection argues that the constructed and contested nature of the female artistic professional was a notable aspect of debates about aesthetic value and the impact of industrial technologies. All the essays in this volume set up a productive inter-art dialogue that complicates conventional binary divisions such as amateur and professional, public and private, artistry and industry in order to provide a more nuanced understanding of the relationship between gender, artistic labour and creativity in the period. Ultimately, how women faced the pragmatics of their own creative labour as they pursued vocations, trades and professions in the literary marketplace and related art-industries reveals the different ideological positions surrounding the transition of women from industrious amateurism to professional artistry.

part I|81 pages

Industrious Amateurism

chapter 1|18 pages

Women's Work

The History of the Victorian Domestic Handicraft

chapter 2|26 pages

Light Work

Feminine Leisure and the Making of Transparencies

chapter 3|20 pages

Pertinacious Industry

The Keyboard Etude and the Female Amateur in England, 1804–20

chapter 4|16 pages

Dresses and Drapery

Female Self-Fashioning in Muslin, 1800–1850

part II|79 pages

The Artistic Career

chapter 6|22 pages

The China Painter

Amateur Celebrities and Professional Stars at Howell and James's ‘Royal Academy of China Painting’

chapter 7|22 pages

Creative Industry

Design, Art Education and the Woman Professional

part III|87 pages

The Craft of Self-Fashioning

chapter 9|20 pages

Negotiating Fame

Mid-Victorian Women Writers and the Romantic Myth of the Gentlemanly Reviewer

chapter 10|20 pages

Crafting the Woman Artist

Ouida and Ariadnê

chapter 12|30 pages

Living Art

Michael Field, Aestheticism and Dress