Between 1870 and 1940 thousands of Australian women were drawn to London, their imperial metropolis and the centre of the art, publishing, theatrical and educational worlds. This study examines connections between whiteness, colonial status and modernity.
"I want to be swept away into a beautiful romantic world, where men are heros and there really is such a thing as true love. This book did that . . . A Page turning sizzler packed full of fun!" ~Cindy Fegan, Reader Lord Arcenbryght Malloren is done with love. If he marries it will be for money to invest in his favorite scheme—canal building. Then he meets the impoverished Portia St. Claire, and is soon entangled in her and her family's ruinous affairs. It doesn't take Bryght long to decide that Portia is the woman for him. But can he persuade Portia to trust a rich, devastatingly handsome nobleman who appears to be a reckless gamester? From The Publisher: Author Jo Beverley is known for her consumate attention to historical detail that wisks the reader back in time to a near first-hand experience. Fans of Regency romance and historical British fiction set in the 19th century, as well as readers of Jess Michaels, Mary Balogh, Christi Caldwell, Stephanie Laurens, Madeline Hunter and Mary Jo Putney will want to read every book by Jo Beverley. "Romance at its best . . ." ~Publisher's Weekly "Intricately plotted, fast-paced, and delightfully wicked . . ." ~Library Journal "A fantastic novel. Jo Beverley shows again why she is considered one of the genre's brightest stars." ~Affaire de Coeur
Focusing on images of or produced by well-to-do nineteenth-century European women, this volume explores genteel femininity as resistant to easy codification vis-?is the public. Attending to various iterations of the public as space, sphere and discourse, sixteen essays challenge the false binary construct that has held the public as the sole preserve of prosperous men. By contrast, the essays collected in Women, Femininity and Public Space in European Visual Culture, 1789-1914 demonstrate that definitions of both femininity and the public were mutually defining and constantly shifting. In examining the relationship between affluent women, femininity and the public, the essays gathered here consider works by an array of artists that includes canonical ones such as Mary Cassatt and Fran?s G?rd as well as understudied women artists including Louise Abb? and Broncia Koller. The essays also consider works in a range of media from fashion prints and paintings to private journals and architectural designs, facilitating an analysis of femininity in public across the cultural production of the period. Various European centers, including Madrid, Florence, Paris, Brittany, Berlin and London, emerge as crucial sites of production for genteel femininity, providing a long-overdue rethinking of modern femininity in the public sphere.
This A-Z reference work provides the first comprehensive reference guide to the wide range of historical writing with which women have been involved, particularly since the Renaissance. The Companion covers biographical writing, travelogue and historical fictions, broadening the concept of history to include the forms of writing with which women have historically engaged. The focus is on women writing in English internationally, but historical and historiographical traditions from beyond the English-speaking world are also examined. Brief biographies of individual writers are included.
The Business of Beauty is a unique exploration of the history of beauty, consumption, and business in Victorian and Edwardian London. Illuminating national and cultural contingencies specific to London as a global metropolis, it makes an important intervention by challenging the view of those who-like their historical contemporaries-perceive the 19th and early 20th centuries as devoid of beauty praxis, let alone a commercial beauty culture. Contrary to this perception, The Business of Beauty reveals that Victorian and Edwardian women and men developed a number of tacit strategies to transform their looks including the purchase of new goods and services from a heterogeneous group of urban entrepreneurs: hairdressers, barbers, perfumers, wigmakers, complexion specialists, hair-restorers, manicurists, and beauty “culturists.” Mining trade journals, census data, periodical print, and advice literature, Jessica P. Clark takes us on a journey through Victorian and Edwardian London's beauty businesses, from the shady back parlors of Sarah “Madame Rachel” Leverson to the elegant showrooms of Eugène Rimmel into the first Mayfair salon of Mrs. Helena Titus, aka Helena Rubinstein. By revealing these stories, Jessica P. Clark revises traditional chronologies of British beauty consumption and provides the historical background to 20th-century developments led by Rubinstein and others. Weaving together histories of gender, fashion, and business to investigate the ways that Victorian critiques of self-fashioning and beautification defined both the buying and selling of beauty goods, this is a revealing resource for scholars, students, fashion followers, and beauty enthusiasts alike.
Antipodean soldiers and writers, meat carcasses and moa, British films and Kiwi tourists—throughout the last 150 years, people, objects and ideas have gone back and forth between New Zealand and London, defining and redefining the relationship between this country and the colonial center that many New Zealanders once called home. Exploring the relationship between a colony and its metropolis from Wakefield to the Wombles, it answers questions, including How did New Zealanders define themselves in relation to the center of British culture? and How did New Zealanders view London when they walked through King's Cross or saw the city in movies? By focusing on particular themes—from agricultural marketing to expatriate writers—this discussion develops a larger story about the construction of colonial and national identities.
Patriotic organizations in prewar Britain are often blamed for the public's enthusiastic response to the outbreak of World War One. The wartime experience of these same organizations is insufficiently understood. In Organized Patriotism and the Crucible of War, Matthew Hendley examines how the stresses and strains of the Great War radically reshaped popular patriotism and imperialism in Britain after 1918. Using insights from gender history and recent accounts of associational life in early twentieth-century Britain, Hendley compares the wartime and postwar histories of three major patriotic organizations founded between 1901 and 1902 - the National Service League, the League of the Empire, and the Victoria League. He shows how the National Service League, strongly masculinist and supportive of militaristic aims, floundered in wartime. Conversely, the League of the Empire and the Victoria League, with strong female memberships, goals related to education and hospitality, and a language emphasizing metaphors of family, home, and kinship prospered in wartime and beyond into the 1920s. Organized Patriotism and the Crucible of War is a richly detailed study of women's roles in Britain during the height of popular imperialism, as well as a major contribution to our understanding of the continuities in Britain before and after the First World War.