ABSTRACT
Terri Doughty observes that, 'Without exception in the stories, wilfulness, ambition and "unwomanliness" are punished'. This is exemplified in the story 'Dorothy's Career', which ran in the immediate wake of the Royal Academy reform, March 1894. The tone is set in the opening passage by the man whom Dorothy declines to marry because 'she wants to have a career; she wants to be famous; she wants to go to London' and have a studio of her own, and become a 'Miss Raphael or a Miss Michael-Angelo'. On re-examination the Royal Academy's concession in its Schools seems to have been more a symptom than a watershed. The Royal Academy's liberalisation of women's participation did not change the terms of the insistent debate around women artists, rather merely modified them. This chapter focuses on the conflict of fact and opinion on territory habitually designated as key to a history of women artists.
