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Gendering Art History In The Victorian Age: Anna Jameson, Elizabeth Eastlake, And George Eliot In Florence, Antje Anderson

School of Art, Art History, and Design: Theses and Student Creative Work

This thesis investigates how three professional Victorian women writers, Anna Jameson, Elizabeth Eastlake, and George Eliot, wrote about Renaissance art in Florence. As nineteenth-century women, they were excluded from certain realms of knowledge, agency, and influence. This exclusion (complicated by their privilege in terms of class, nationality, and education) influenced the way they experienced and wrote about art. The introduction addresses how changing modes of travel, broader access to publication, and art history’s gradual emergence as an academic discipline helped shape their careers as women art writers—the well-known “Mrs. Jameson” as a popularizer of art history for a broad readership; …