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Suffragist Artists in Partnership: Gender, Word and Image

Online ISBN:
9781474444934
Print ISBN:
9781474421454
Publisher:
Edinburgh University Press
Book

Suffragist Artists in Partnership: Gender, Word and Image

Published online:
20 September 2018
Published in print:
1 January 2018
Online ISBN:
9781474444934
Print ISBN:
9781474421454
Publisher:
Edinburgh University Press

Abstract

This book explores the interconnected creative partnerships of the Wattses and the De Morgans: Victorian artists, writers and suffragists. The couples were close friends and collaborators. The study demonstrates how Mary and George Watts, and Evelyn and William De Morgan worked, individually and together, to support greater gender equality and female liberation in the nineteenth century. The author traces their relationship to early and more recent feminism, reclaiming them as influential early feminists and reading their works from twentieth-century theoretical perspectives. By focusing on neglected female figures in creative partnerships, the book challenges longstanding perceptions of them as the subordinate wives of famous Victorian artists and of their marriages as representative of the traditional gender binary. This is also the first academic critical study of Mary Watts’s recently published diaries, Evelyn De Morgan’s unpublished writings, and other previously unexplored archival material by the Wattses and the De Morgans. It offers a more nuanced understanding of power relations between the sexes as well as of the relationship between feminism, literature and art in the period.

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