Colour'd Shadows : Contexts in Publishing, Printing, and Reading Nineteenth-Century British Women Writers

A large body of nineteenth-century British women's literature highlights the use of verbal illusions, even while its essence remains the premise of inward and personal experience. In the age of commercial distribution, the nonequivalence of personal feeling and printed product is sometimes rendered bitterly, but sometimes that nonequivalence evokes the opulence of artifice. Colour'd Shadows is a sequence of arguments about such relationships of material form and material exchange with literary meaning, proceeding from specific examples in the writings and careers of women writers and various publishing genres, including Victorian periodicals and literary annuals. This book studies the print culture of the nineteenth century as it shaped the meanings and the cultural significance of literary works by women writers - Mary Robinson, Felicia Hemans, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Lady Blessington, Lady Morgan, Caroline Norton, Letitia Elizabeth Landon, and others. Colour'd Shadows explains and interprets the physical forms of their books, the economics and politics of production and reception, and the cultural meanings of their literary work, showing how poems, literary annuals, engravings, commercial arrangements, the practices of women editors as well as writers, the politics of gender, the changing means of production, and women's literary relationships unfold in the medium of print and, more largely, the rapidly changing culture of the century. Front Matter....Pages i-xi Introduction....Pages 1-17 Scholarly Fantasy and Material Reality in Mary Robinson’s Sappho and Phaon....Pages 19-31 Ideology and Textuality in Hemans’s Records of Woman ....Pages 33-46 Scandal as Commodity and the “Calumniated Woman”....Pages 47-73 “The Very Roads of Literature”: Women Editors of Nineteenth-Century British Literary Annuals....Pages 75-93 Voluptuous Opportunities: Visual Images in the Keepsake ....Pages 95-124 “The Fate of Woman At Its Root”: Elizabeth Barrett’s A Drama of Exile and Jean Ingelow’s A Story of Doom....Pages 125-135 “Varied Forms Pass Glitt’ring”: Violet Fane’s Denzil Place: A Story in Verse....Pages 137-152 Back Matter....Pages 153-198 "A large body of nineteenth-century British women's literature highlights the use of verbal illusions, even while its advertisement remains the premise of inward and personal experience. In the age of commercial distribution, the non-equivalence of personal feeling and printed product is sometimes rendered bitterly, but sometimes that nonequivalence evokes the opulence of artifice. "Colour'd Shadows" is a sequence of arguments about such relationships of material form and material exchange with literary meaning, proceeding from specific examples in the writings and careers of women writers and various publishing genres, including Victorian periodicals and literary annuals."--Jacket