Drawing on extensive archival research, this chapter studies various neglected writings – private and published – by the Wattses and the De Morgans. Exploring questions of authorship and authority, it analyses collaborative and individual writings that focus on and inscribe the female body: Evelyn's unpublished juvenilia, William's neglected novels (written and published in partnership with Evelyn), and their anonymously published automatic writing; George's anticorsetry article (conveying both his and Mary's views, republished in Mary's Annals), Mary's private experimentation with poetry, and her published guide to her symbolic decoration The Word in the Pattern. With the exception of William, who embarked on a second career as a novelist, these figures have never before been appraised as literary as well as artistic figures, and their writings are largely unexplored. I will analyse and compare the representation of women in their writings, showing how they explored women's place, engaged with contentious early feminist debates, and supported or promoted women's liberation in both their literary and visual works.

The De Morgans: Juvenilia, Novels, Automatic Writing

In addition to her diary, Evelyn wrote stories, poems and plays (c.1860s–70), a magazine called The Reader (1869), The Child's Own Book of Fairy Tales (monographed in the Preface) and the beginning of a novel titled Nora De Brant (1869). These childhood writings currently reside unpublished and untranscribed in the De Morgan Foundation archives, and have never before been studied. While these have been entirely disregarded and dismissed as trivial juvenilia, many reveal the ‘remarkable, if somewhat grim, imagination and beauty of vision’ (Stirling undated) – as well as the progressive and (proto)feminist thought and feeling – of the self-proclaimed ‘Authoress’ (E. De Morgan notebook 1869: NP). Many of her writings parallel or prefigure her paintings in theme and focus on the female figure, and those with identical titles (for example, her poems and paintings titled ‘Love the Misleader’, ‘The Angel of Death’ and ‘The Valley of Shadows’) can be read as ‘double works’, for which her Pre-Raphaelite predecessor Dante Gabriel Rossetti is famed. Her literary and visual texts share a vocabulary of spirits, angels, death, rebirth, nature, prisoners, the sea, mermaids and mothers, and can be read alongside each other to enhance an understanding of the ways in which Evelyn explored the role and representation of women in her work from a young age.