Victorian Women Writers and the Classics The Feminine of Homer [Hardcover]

Isobel Hurst examines the role of women writers in the Victorian reception of ancient Greece and Rome, showing that they had a greater imaginative engagement with classical literature than has previously been acknowledged. The restrictions which applied to women's access to classical learning liberated them from the repressive and sometimes alienating effects of a traditional classical education. Women writers' reworkings of classical texts serve a variety of purposes: to validate women's claims to authorship, to demand access to education, to highlight feminist issues through the heroines of ancient tragedy, to repudiate the warrior ethos of ancient epic.

Introduction
1. Encounters with the ancient world in nineteenth-century literature
2. Classical training for the woman writer
3. `Unscrupulously epic'
4. Classics and the family in the Victorian novel
5. Greek heroines and the wrongs of women
6. Revising the Victorians
Conclusion

Hurst succeeds phenomenally in exposing the breadth of classical influence on Victorian women's imaginations. The impressive breadth of Hurst's reading and research helps to create a wonderful balance between attention to individual motives and a more general emphasis on the role of classics in helping women achieve intellectual authority, social recognition, and self-fulfillment. --Nineteenth-Century Gender Studies

Isobel Hurstis Tutor in English and Classics at the Universities of Oxford and Warwick.