ABSTRACT
This chapter considers how Alcott and Rossetti resisted their male relatives’ models of artistic individualism in familial correspondence, autobiographical fiction, and collaborative literary projects. Alcott satirizes her father’s egotism in her epistolary responses to his moral instruction and her fictionalized portrayals of his life as a Transcendentalist philosopher. Rossetti explores the ramifications of her brother, Dante Gabriel’s, individualism for the Pre-Raphaelite muse, who is portrayed as a lifeless corpse, in her epistolary writing and poetic entries to The Germ magazine. Both authors develop alternative theologies of renunciation that conceive women’s fulfilment as found either in service to God or others.
