Like Proust's Berma, Vashti in Charlotte Brontë's Villette is a literary image of an actress who was legendary to begin with. Rachel (1821–58), before Sarah Bernhardt, was “one of the greatest actresses France, or perhaps the world, has ever known.” Named Élisa- or Élisabeth-Rachel Félix at her birth, she chose to be called “Rachel” tout court, professionally, and only that name is carved on her monument in the Paris cemetery of Pere Lachaise – marking a victory of choice over accident, art over nature. Single like a queen's, the name reflects her singularity and also suggests her emblematic, hypostasized dimension, her status as an abstraction. “Mlle Rachel est un principe,” wrote one enthusiast of her time, arguing that she symbolized the theater.

My title, “George Eliot, Other-Wise Marian Evans,” is intended in the first place simply to remind us of the Marian Evans behind George Eliot and to get us to acknowledge afresh the strangeness of her situation as a woman living within a man's name. It also reminds us that she brought wisdom to her creation of George Eliot, a wisdom derived in part from her awareness of the complex history of her own life and in part from the intense dedication with which she practised her vocation of authorship.

In “AnEssay on Comedy and the Uses of the Comic Spirit” Meredith makes his famous equation between the status of women and the quality of comedy in a given culture. These two generalized manifestations of civilization - the organized arrangements of gender and genre - evolve together, claims Meredith, in an argument that is no less intriguing for being somewhat circular as to causal relations. But whether comedy is to be regarded as cause or as effect of a progressive civilization, Meredith, defines cultural progress as the growth of social equality between women and men

The Victorians Were obsessed with themes of love and courtship, which dominated the walls of the Royal Academy in increasing numbers from the middle of the century to its end. While in the early 1800s a canvas with such a subject was often entitled something like The Marriage of Bacchus and Ariadne, Cupid and Psyche, or Scipio Restoring the Captive Princess to her Lover, by the 1840s the pictorial interest had shifted to essentially bourgeois portrayals. With each year thetally of courtship themes escalated, vignettes of lovelorn maidens appearing on exhibition walls alongside canvases with ludicrous titles and themes like The Leper's Bride. Within this wide scope of amorousness, however, love was firmly fixed in the Victorian consciousness as transpiring in the sovereign domain of the earthly paradise, and more precisely, in the middle-class garden or its perimeters in nature.

Reviewing her career as a professional poet, Aurora Leigh describes her dubiously successful beginnings:

My ballads prospered; but the ballad's race

Is rapid for a poet who bears weights

Of thought and golden image ….

Barrett Browning's ballads had prospered too, and like Aurora she did not find their success particularly creditable, a judgment that has been emphatically shared by twentieth-century critics. But when Robert Browning told her in his first letter that he loved her poems, these were the ones he meant. The ballads are almost the only works of hers that he mentions in their correspondence, and he mentions them often. Gracious Lady Geraldine, bold and selfimmolating Duchess May, the lady disguised as a page who dies defending her husband from the Saracens - such heroines charmed a large and diverse company of Victorian admirers, including Mary Russell Mitford, Edgar Allan Poe, Harriet Martineau, Thomas Carlyle, and most of Elizabeth Barrett's friends and reviewers, in the years before her marriage when her reputation was made.

Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Aurora Leigh has become a key text for feminist critics concerned with nineteenth-century women writers. For some, Aurora Leigh is a revolutionary poem, a passionate indictment of patriarchy that speaks the resentment of the Victorian woman poet through a language of eroticized female imagery. For others, the poem is less explosive, and Barrett Browning's liberal feminism is seen as compromised by Aurora Leigh's eventual dedication to a life governed by traditionally male directives. In my view, however, Aurora Leigh is neither revolutionary nor compromised: rather, it is a coherent expression of Barrett Browning's conservative sexual politics, and I shall argue that female imagery is employed to show that the “art” of the woman poet performs a “service” for a patriarchal vision of the apocalypse. In Aurora Leigh woman's art is made the servitor of male ideal.

Guido's marriage to Pompilia was a mismatch by age, class, education, and temperament. The disparity, however, runs much deeper than any of these elements. The rift between them is a disparity in the very quality of their souls and is the source of Guido's surpassing hatred and gratuitous malevolence toward his wife. The public, however, seems uninterested in the mysterious subtleties of this couple's spiritual drama. Though Count Guido Franceschini is on trial for murder, the issue is the virtue of his victim. Pompilia Comparini is on trial as an erring wife, a violator of husbandly honor. Because Guido's spiritual quality is reflected in society, that society has no problem supporting him in his defense of such an overt, cowardly, and heinous crime. The sympathetic bond between the nobleman and his auditors is the base for his brash, swaggering bravado about the murder by himself and four armed men of an old man, an old woman, and a seventeen-year-old girl recovering from childbirth. Hardly the stuff of heroism, yet Guido speaks from an eminence of security with the swagger of cheap heroics.

This passage from Epipsychidion is Shelley's legacy to the many Victorian writers who were fascinated by the image of the kiss. In these lines, Shelley both alludes to the conceits traditionally used to describe kissing and raises the darker and more complex issues that Victorian writers went on to explore.

William Morris's early poetry is striking for its erotic intensity and powerful evocations of passionate and unhappy women. Indeed, his portrayals of confined, alienated, and dependent women are so sharp that they pose some obvious questions. Do they, in the end, simply stylize and project some of the most destructive conventions of Victorian patriarchy? Or do they actually provide some “defence” of female passion and sexuality, against the social hierarchies and emotional suffocation they depict?