This volume brings together the varied artistic, critical and cultural productions by women scholars, critics and artists between 1790-1900. It looks at women working outside conventional canons, and are shown how they negotiated relationships with canonical forms of artistic production.

Introduction: Gender and Women’s HistoryGill Perry, Anne Laurence, Joan BellamyChapter 1: Musing On Muses: Representing The Actress as ‘Artist’ in British Art of the Late Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth CenturiesGill PerryChapter 2: Distant Prospects and Smaller Circles: Questions of Authority in Maria Edgeworth’s Irish WritingsMadeline ThompsonChapter 3: Scholarship and Sensibility: Anna Jameson and Sydney Morgan in Siren LandChloe ChardChapter 4: Mary Shelley as Editor of the Poems of Percy ShelleyRichard AllenChapter 5: Women and Education in Nineteenth Century EnglandRosemary O’DayChapter 6:Mary Cowden Clarke’s Labours of LoveCicely Palser HavelyChapter 7: Women Historians and Documentary Research: Lucy Aikin, Agnes Strickland, Mary Anne Everett Green, and Lucy Toulmin SmithAnne LaurenceChapter 8:Margaret Oliphant, “Mightier than the mightiest of her sex.”Joan BellamyChapter 9: ‘Hints on Household Taste’ and ‘The Art of Decoration’: Authors, Their Audience and Gender in Interior DesignColin CunninghamChapter 10: Women, Translation and EmpowermentLorna HardwickChapter 11: ‘I Love My Sex’: Two Late-Victorian Pulpit WomenSusan MummPostscript BibliographyBiographies

Brings together the varied artistic, critical and cultural productions by women scholars, critics and artists between 1790-1900, many of whom are little known in the canonical histories of the period. Questions the concepts of 'scholarship', 'criticism' and 'artist' across the different disciplines. Women discussed include authors (Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, Sydney Morgan and Anna Jameson) actresses ( Elizabeth Siddons, Dorothy Jordan, and Mary Robinson) critics ( Margaret Oliphant and Mary Cowden Clarke) historians (Agnes Strickland, Lucy Aikin, Mary Anne Everett Green, Elizabeth Cooper and Lucy Toulmin Smith) as well as the writers and readers of Women's magazines, educationalists and translators. Makes a significant and original contribution to the development of gender studies by extending the frontiers of existing knowledge and research.