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 womans writing with Ruskins. Focusing on literature, art, economics, and gender, it offers close readings of a selection of each womans oeuvre alongside Ruskins 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 Ruskins art theory offered women writers engaged with social questions and the apparent influence of these writers on Ruskins own emerging political economy. By analysing women writers responses to Ruskins workand his response to theirsthis book complicates and challenges assumptions about Ruskins supposedly troubled relationship with women.