John Ruskin and the Victorian Woman Writer

John Ruskin and the Victorian Woman Writer addresses the little-considered personal and literary relationships of John Ruskin and four major Victorian women writers: Elizabeth Barrett Browning, George Eliot, Elizabeth Gaskell, and Christina Rossetti. Drawing on new archival, primary research, the book provides detailed biographical contexts for each of these relationships before considering the interplay of each woman’s writing with Ruskin’s. Focusing on literature, art, economics, and gender, it offers close readings of a selection of each woman’s oeuvre alongside Ruskin’s prose to demonstrate the affinities and the moments of disagreement between Ruskin and these writers. Though primarily aimed at an academic audience, the book will also be of interest to general readers with a developed interest in nineteenth-century culture. It advances readers’ understandings of the complex web of influence that existed between Ruskin and women writers in the 1850s and 1860s, establishing the opportunities that Ruskin’s art theory offered women writers engaged with social questions and the apparent influence of these writers on Ruskin’s own emerging political economy. By analysing women writers’ responses to Ruskin’s work--and his response to theirs--this book complicates and challenges assumptions about Ruskin’s supposedly troubled relationship with women.

Anne Longmuir is Professor of English at Kansas State University. She completed a Ph.D. on the fiction of Don DeLillo at the University of Edinburgh and specializes in British Victorian Literature and Contemporary American Fiction. She has published articles and book chapters on John Ruskin, Elizabeth Gaskell, Wilkie Collins, Charlotte Bronte, Don DeLillo and J. M. Coetzee. She co-edited Victorian Literature: Criticism and Debates (Routledge, 2016) with Lee Behlman (Montclair State University). She is a recipient of the Sassoon Fellowship from the Bodleian Libraries at the University of Oxford.