“‘In the garb of ancient Greece’: Late-Victorian Women Poets and the Gendering of Classicism”.

When Augusta Webster (1837-1894) published the dramatic monologue
Medea (1870) the frst college for women in Cambridge – namely Girton
– had been open for hardly a year. She could not attend university, but like
Amy Levy (1861-1889) she decided to engage herself in the study of Latin
and Greek. At the time Classics as a discipline was undergoing a process
of redefnition which had started in the 1860s and was to continue in the
following decades. Between the 1870s and the 1890s Victorian women who
pursued an intellectual career in the classics had to contend with a double
prejudice. The frst concerned the supposed weakness of the female mind,
which would prevent them from attaining ‘serious’ knowledge; moreover, a
second specifc limitation impinged upon their access to classical education,
for it was widely regarded as an exclusively male feld. Augusta Webster and
Amy Levy approached ancient philosophy and literature – especially Greek
– in a controversial period of transition, when Antiquity was becoming a site
of contention between a male dominated centre and cultural margins. Their
poetical revisionism testifes to late-Victorian women’s “movement into the
classical tradition” (Olverson 2010: 17) and their creative rewriting of it
from a (proto-) feminist perspective.