ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on two of renarrations: Liber Amoris and Miss Brown. William Hazlitt's own Pygmalion story, Liber Amoris, additionally inspired by Rousseau's La Nouvelle Heloise and Confessions, appeared shortly after, and was informed by William Holman Hunt's translation. Whereas Ovid's tale remains the foundational text that informed both Romantic and Victorian revisions, British Romantics were clearly also inspired by Rousseau's one-act play, Pygmalion. The focus on the Pygmalion myth, expressed in the sculptural metaphors employed in Liber Amoris and Miss Brown suggest that the texts are informed by their authors' respective concerns aesthetic theory. That each sits uneasily on the border between fact and fiction implies that, for each, questions of art and life and the interactions between them remain poised on the precarious line between idealism and disillusionment.
