ABSTRACT
The discourse of compatibility between art and the domestic sphere that was so influential in representations of the artist was also employed by Victorian authors in order to legitimate their characters’, and their own, creative ambitions. In Aurora Leigh, for instance, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, as I have shown, characterises Aurora’s conventional domestic activity of sewing as a screen behind which she can conceal her poetic musings. As Aurora describes her early domestic life, she explains:
Whether or not Aurora’s sewing actually helps in her development as a poet, or provides a creative stimulus, as Jennie Croly had argued it could, sewing and poetry are at least shown to be compatible. Not only can Aurora soar on the heights of aesthetic sensibility while she sews, but also such a rich ‘inner life’ helps her meet the drudgery of her womanly duty with equanimity. However, unlike the bright crimson screen that contains Olive Rothesay’s artistry while boldly announcing its place in her domestic identity, Aurora’s screen of needlework completely obscures her
inner poetic life from the outside world. In concealing Aurora’s artistry in this way, Barrett Browning participates in what Mary Jean Corbett describes as the middleclass woman writer’s ‘tactful silences’. Such schemes, she argues, were a denial of the public and professional nature of her work: ‘[K]nowing themselves to be divided between the privacy of the domestic and the publicity of the market, they may yet minimize the effects of their rupture with conventional femininity by not calling attention to it’.2 Similarly, Valerie Sanders demonstrates that the autobiographies of female writers seemed to attend only rarely to the actual practice of writing.3 While Corbett and Sanders are speaking specifically about how women writers represent themselves in autobiographical works, I would suggest that this deliberate silence could also account for the relative paucity of representations of women writers in women’s fiction of the mid-Victorian period. Although there was a proliferation of fictional female writers in New Woman novels, there are only a few narratives from the mid-Victorian period that feature an authoress as their heroine.4 Even the number of periodical articles written about women writers does not approach those about seamstresses, artists, or actresses. Where such discussions do appear, they often tend to be in the form of reviews or biographical pieces where the issue of woman as author cannot be so easily ignored. Silence was both a personal choice and a cultural mechanism for diffusing the tensions created by the introduction of the private woman’s voice to the public sphere.
