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In her autobiography The Sheltering Tree (1939), critically-neglected New Woman writer Netta Syrett (1865-1943) records her pride as editor of children’s annual The Dream Garden (1905): ‘I think I had a right to be proud of my Dream Garden, which by now should be a rarity worth the attention of book collectors, if only for the names of some of the contributors!’[i] In a further comment that is both self-effacing and self-congratulating, she writes, ‘I marvel at my boldness in asking such distinguished people to contribute to a more or less private venture […] only a limited number were published’.[ii] The wealth of notable writers and artists boasted by the contents page offers insight into Netta’s creative network and her esteemed place within it. While this list features well-known male writers including Laurence Housman and Arthur Ransome, the contributors are overwhelmingly female. They include artist, author and playwright Constance Smedley (1876-1941), who founded the International Lyceum Club for Women Artists and Writers in 1904 (of which Netta was chairwoman in 1906); Marion Wallace Dunlop (1864-1942), hailed as the first hunger-striking suffragette (in 1909); Slade-trained artist Alice Woodward (1862-1951), a founding member of the Women’s Guild of Arts (1907); and feminist artist, writer, and editor Pamela Colman Smith (1878-1951). The Dream Garden, like Netta’s autobiography, evidences her ‘genius for friendship’: that is, her ability to form mutually-beneficial career-enabling companionships and creative partnerships, where ‘socialising becomes part of [her] artistry’.[iii] [i] Netta Syrett, The Sheltering Tree (Geoffrey Bles, 1939), p. 152; The Dream Garden: A Children’s Annual, ed. by Netta Syrett (John Baillie, 1905). Henceforth Netta Syrett is referred to as ‘Netta’ and her sister Nellie Syrett will be referred to as ‘Nellie’, to avoid confusion due to their shared surname. [ii] Syrett, Sheltering Tree, pp. 149–50. [iii] Richard Le Gallienne, The Romantic ’90s (G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1925), pp.191–92; Joseph Thorne, ‘Decadent Sociability and Material Culture at the Fin de Siècle’ (unpublished doctoral thesis, PhD thesis, Liverpool John Moores University, 2019) [accessed 27 September 2023], p. 1.

In Spring 2022, the British Association of Decadence Studies together with the ����Vlog hosted a series of Jeudis talks on women whose work intersected with the iconic fin-de-siècle quarterly periodical The Yellow Book (1894-1897). Although many women of The Yellow Book are gradually receiving increasing critical attention, these seminars provided the first opportunity for a multidisciplinary discussion of the lives and works of women who contributed in various ways to the periodical. The Jeudis sessions encouraged a consideration of the connections and dialogues between these women, drawing out their networks and communities, and exploring how The Yellow Book represented a cornerstone of their careers.

Whilst decadence implies decline, “endings are often new beginnings” (p. 107), says Adams, whose book documents how the fin de siècle brought women writers greater personal, professional, and political freedoms. Focused on critically-neglected women writers’ contributions to the iconic decadent periodical the Yellow Book, Adams’s book is the first to bring so many of them together in one volume and to present them not at the periphery but at the centre of Yellow Book culture. Although no woman actively identified as decadent in the 1890s, which was more typically associated with men like Aubrey Beardsley and Oscar Wilde, Adams’s book places women “at the centre of the most exciting developments in art and literature” (p. 196). The morally-dubious Decadent and the independent New Woman – viewed by Victorians as “twin monsters of a degenerate age” (quoting Elaine Showalter’s 1993 book Daughters of Decadence) – both had “revolutionary potential”, and the Yellow Book evidences their “joint artistic enterprise” (pp. 105-6).

While much has been written about the eminent Victorian artist George Frederic Watts (1817-1904), dubbed ‘England’s Michelangelo’, the life and works of his wife Mary Seton Watts (1849-1938) are comparatively neglected. Mary was not only an artist and designer but also a writer and diarist, although her (currently unpublished) diaries have never before been studied. This article explores the Wattses’ conjugal creative partnership through a reading of Mary’s diaries covering their marital years (1886-1904), offering an unprecedented insight into their professional and personal relationship. It not only reveals their facilitating roles in each other’s creative practices, but also the tensions and gender-role inversions in their partnership, challenging traditional perceptions of Mary as George’s peripheral, submissive wife. Unlike her self-effacing published biography of George Watts, Mary’s private life writing reveals her role as a respected artistic equal, intellectual companion and even ‘brutal taskmaster’. This article explores the Wattses’ artistic collaborations, joint reading practice, and life/death writing through a reading of Mary’s long-forgotten diaries, which document her approach to marriage, gender, art and literature. It recovers her culturally-important life writing, traces the emergence of her artistic identity and feminist voice, and reclaims her as a remarkable diarist for the first time.

This collection of essays explores the myriad ways in which the women's suffrage movement in Britain in the nineteenth century and twentieth century engaged with, and was expressed through literature, art and craft, music, drama and cinema. Uniquely, this anthology places developments in the constituent arts side by side, and in dialogue, rather than focusing on a single field in isolation. In so doing, it illustrates how creative endeavours in different artforms converged in support of women's suffrage. Topics encompassed range from the artistic output of such household names as Sylvia Pankhurst and Ethel Smyth, to the recent feature film Suffragette. It also brings to light under-represented figures and neglected works related to the suffrage movement. A wide variety of material is explored, from poems, diaries and newspapers to posters, dress and artefacts to songs, opera, plays and film.Published in the wake of the centenary of many women receiving the parliamentary vote in the UK, this book will appeal to scholars, undergraduate and graduate students, and members of the public interested in the broad areas of women's history and the women's suffrage movement, as well as across the arts disciplines.

Symbolist craftswoman Mary Seton Watts (née Fraser Tytler) (1849–1938) and ‘England’s Michelangelo’ (Blunt 1989) George Frederic Watts read John Ruskin’s works in their reading alcove, known as the ‘niche’, that Mary designed for the sitting room at their ����Vlog studio-home. The couple named this abode ‘Limnerslease’: ‘limner’ being Latin for ‘artist’ and ‘leasen’ being the Old English word meaning ‘to glean’, in the hope that golden years of creativity would be gleaned there. Ruskin’s writings were often comforting or thought-provoking bedtime reads for the couple. They were enchanted by his concept of nature’s divine powers in his work The Queen of the Air (1869), which Mary gave to her husband for his 74th birthday. The Wattses held Ruskin in an almost religious reverence among the ‘great preachers’, championing his ‘great gospel’ and ‘beautifully holy mind’.1 George Watts told Mary (as he stepped into his bath) that he thought ‘Ruskin had perhaps the most original mind of all the great men of his day’. The many references to Ruskin’s works in Mary’s diaries—the majority of which remain unpublished—reflect his deep influence on the couple’s thinking as a leading art critic of their day. They also illuminate the private sacred conversations that took place not only between artists but also between husband and wife.

The women's suffrage movement engaged with art in many different ways, enabling campaigners to express their political views as well as generating publicity for the cause. This chapter discusses the movement's engagement with art in terms of literature, the visual arts, music and drama, indicating how early feminist activists worked in these different fields in collective support of the campaign. It provides a brief outline of the women's suffrage movement in the UK and its key organisations, identifying some of the previous scholarship in the field. It also offers an overview of the contents of the volume, concluding with a one-paragraph summary of each of its chapters in turn. The women's suffrage movement, emerging in the second half of the nineteenth century and gaining momentum in the early twentieth century, engaged with art in myriad ways. Art, in its widest sense, enabled campaigners to express their personal ideologies as well as generate invaluable publicity for the women's cause. Sending a postcard of a women's suffrage poster or a photograph of one of the movement's leaders, or serving afternoon tea to one's guests using a china tea set adorned with the colours and emblems of women's suffrage, effectively constituted a political act. In high street shops dedicated to women's suffrage, as well as regional offices, objets d'art and artistic keepsakes (some of them, such as pin badges, reasonably priced so as to attract women of low income) were available as merchandise, providing a useful

This interdisciplinary, historicist-feminist paper (combining literary and art historical perspectives as well as an awareness of historical context and an application of recent feminist theory) explores the feminist affiliations of the Victorian artists Mary and George Watts, focusing specifically on their close friendships with the writer and women’s suffrage supporter George Meredith and the women’s rights worker Josephine Butler. It introduces the Wattses’ own anti-patriarchal conjugal creative partnership before investigating their relationships with Meredith and Butler through a reading of Mary Watts’s unpublished and hitherto untranscribed diaries (which record their interactions) as well as a discussion of George Watts’s paintings (particularly his portraits of Meredith and Butler in his ‘Hall of Fame’). This paper thus offers an unprecedented insight into the Wattses’ personal and professional relationships as well as their progressive socio-political positions, reclaiming them as early feminists who were part of a wider emergent feminist community. This paper’s discussion of the Wattses, Meredith, and Butler provides new perspectives on the connections, works, and views of these public literary, artistic, and feminist figures as well as the ways in which they supported and promoted the women’s rights movement that escalated over the course of the second half of the nineteenth century. It thus offers a fuller understanding of these figures as well as of the rise of early feminism in the Victorian period.

While much has been written about the famous Victorian artist George Frederic Watts (1817–1904), dubbed ‘England’s Michelangelo’, the life and works of his wife Mary Seton Watts (1849–1938) are comparatively neglected. Mary was not only an artist and designer but also a writer and diarist, although her diaries have never before been studied. This article explores the Wattses’ conjugal creative partnership through a reading of Mary’s diaries covering their marital years (1886–1904), offering an unprecedented insight into their professional and personal relationship. It not only reveals their facilitating roles in each other’s creative practices, but also the tensions and gender-role inversions in their partnership, challenging traditional perceptions of Mary as George’s peripheral, submissive wife. Unlike her self-effacing published biography of George Watts, Mary’s private life writing reveals her role as a respected artistic equal, intellectual companion and even ‘brutal taskmaster’. This article explores the Wattses’ artistic collaborations, joint reading practice, and life/death writing through a reading of Mary’s long-forgotten diaries, which document her approach to marriage, gender, art and literature. It recovers her culturally-important life writing, traces the emergence of her artistic identity and feminist voice, and reclaims her as a remarkable diarist.

Focusing on critically-neglected works by prolific writer Netta Syrett (1865-1943), this article reveals her New Woman dialogue with aestheticism and decadence in her short stories writ-ten for the iconic 1890s periodical The Yellow Book: primarily, ‘A Correspondence’ (1895) and ‘Far Above Rubies’ (1897). Together they trace Syrett’s increasingly assertive voice and navigation of the period’s seemingly competing but intersecting aesthetic, decadent and fem-inist movements. I argue that Syrett uses aesthetic and decadent discourses as strategic vehi-cles for the articulation of her evolving feminist ideas that are more fully expressed in her lat-er pro-suffrage works. Specifically, her stories register her response to the male elitism and misogyny of aestheticism and decadence through a critical engagement with their tropes (ex-otic setting; aestheticized interior; femme fatale) and discourses (of mythology; statuary; flo-riography) in order to challenge the objectification and marginalization of women by mascu-linist culture using its own terms of reference. Syrett’s stories are thus discursive spaces through which she articulates anxieties about women’s place in, or exclusion from, aestheti-cism and decadence, asserting her role in these movements as both participant and critic. This article thus offers a more comprehensive understanding of the evolving discourses of, as well as the dialogues and debates enacted by, fin-de-siècle women’s writing, as well as shedding new light on the aesthetic and decadent movements.

This is the first book dedicated to examining the marital relationships of Mary and George Watts and Evelyn and William De Morgan as creative partnerships. The study demonstrates how they 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 representatives 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.

This article explores the subversive representations of women and death – and specifically the ‘M/Other’ – by the eminent Victorian artist George Frederic Watts (1817–1904) and his lesser-known wife Mary Seton Watts (née Fraser Tytler, 1849–1938). Using a historicist-feminist approach which combines an awareness of historical context with an application of twentieth-century feminist theory to nineteenth-century visual texts, this paper explores: the neglected works of Mary Watts in relation to the more famous paintings of G.F. Watts; the Wattses’ conjugal creative partnership; their progressive socio-political positions; and their (proto-)feminist works featuring the mother figure. These are all understudied areas in existing scholarship on the Wattses. Through a comparison of Mary and G.F Watts’s visual works in relation to those of their contemporaries, this paper aims to show how the Wattses supported and promoted female emancipation and empowerment through their art, thus reclaiming them as early feminist artists. Central to the originality of this paper is the primary focus on Mary Watts, who has been historically overshadowed by the dominant critical focus on her husband, ‘England’s Michelangelo’; the socio-political (and specifically, feminist) influences, messages, subtexts and functions of her work have never before been explored in detail.

Novelist, short story writer and poet Christina Liddell (née Fraser Tytler) (1848-1927) is one of the many neglected non-canonical women writers of the nineteenth century. Despite her fame during her day and her familial and professional connections to Victorian celebrities, including Julia Margaret Cameron, she is now relatively unknown and no study of her currently exists. She is herself a silence in the archive. It was Christina who introduced her artistic younger sister Mary to ‘England’s Michelangelo’ George Frederic Watts, facilitating and remaining at the heart of one of Victorian Britain’s most famous conjugal creative partnerships. Indeed, George called for Christina on his deathbed, and she is now buried beside the couple. This article explores their unconventional triangular relationship and analyses evidence of their eroticised interfamilial creative partnership, which reconfigured hegemonic family structures and represented a progressive if not radical approach to gender and marital politics. Through a reading of Mary’s private diaries alongside her published biography or quasi-hagiography of her husband, this article investigates censorship, suppression and silence in the form of textual subtexts, ambiguous intimacy, dying words and hallucinations, secret parentage, missing diary pages and posthumous interventions. It addresses omissions in auto/biography and in the archive, bringing previously unseen material to light and illuminating institutional silence. Combining literary, art historical and theoretical perspectives, it analyses neglected diaries, auto/biography and letters alongside poetry, paintings and photographs in order to offer insight into the untold complexities of Victorian familial relationships and sexualities. This article uses Victorian women’s life writing to explore the complex interconnections of married couples, adult sisters and sibling-in-laws, offering a broader understanding of filial bonds, conjugal arrangements and eroticised relationships in the long nineteenth century.