Women’s minds and bodies on the move: nineteenth-century British women’s reading parties and study abroad

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Acknowledgements

My thanks to PhD student Ms. Preeshita Biswas, Addie Levy Research Associate (2023–2024), for her assistance with research on Sarah Parker Remond and Anna Julia Cooper, and for suggesting the reference to Woolf 1989.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Ros Pesman (2003) focuses on nineteenth-century Australian painter Adelaide Ironside, who traveled to Italy for advanced training; she also notes other Anglo-American women artists who studied abroad, including Harriet Hosmer, Jane Benham, and Anna Mary Howitt. Julie Codell’s The Victorian Artist: Artists’ Lifewritings in Britain (2003, 143–146), and Alexandra K. Wettlaufer’s Portraits of the Artist as a Young Woman (2011, 69–74) also comment on Howitt’s two-volume memoir of her study abroad, An Art-Student in Munich (1853). I likewise discuss Howitt in terms of cultural exchange in Victorian Women Writers and the Other Germany (Hughes 2022, 70–77).

2 Walton’s monograph, focused on the last three decades of the nineteenth century, focuses especially on Franco-American exchange.

3 Sadly, as Yopie Prins recounts, Magill’s efforts were a great disappointment. She sat for the Tripos when she was ill and rather than winning honors was rated as minimally passing (2017, 21–22).

4 Lamberton additionally notes that, from 1874–1914, “Sixty-seven American women studied at Cambridge … while 44 Newnham and Girton women traveled to the United States to pursue academic study or to teach” (2014, 568).

5 For a thoughtful analysis of Clough’s poem in the context of Victorian liberalism, see Barton 2014.

6 Lamberton’s sources are the unsigned article “A Girton Reading Party” (1886) and D[ickson] 1903.

7 Though he applies the concept of “healthy body, healthy mind” strictly to men, historian Bruce Haley notes that nineteenth-century physiological science increasingly emphasized the mind-body connection and their interdependence in health. Hence “a growing belief that education should develop the whole man [sic] inspired an interest in physical training as an essential part of personal culture” (Haley 1978, 4).

8 Concern about bad, rather than too little, food also characterized women students during term time; as Martha Vicinus points out, “The food was so bad at Newnham in the mid-nineties that eighteen students sent a formal complaint to the principal” (1985, 130). Compare Virginia Woolf’s 1929 reaction to women’s inferior food in university dining halls: “a good dinner is of great importance to good talk. One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well” (1989, 18).

9 As Pater comments, “if we begin with the inward world of thought and feeling, the whirlpool is still more rapid, the flame more eager and devouring … At first sight experience seems to bury us under a flood of external objects, pressing upon us with a sharp and importunate reality, calling us out of ourselves in a thousand forms of action. But when reflexion begins to play upon these objects they are dissipated under its influence; the cohesive force seems suspended like some trick of magic; each object is loosed into a group of impressions – color, odor, texture – in the mind of the observer. And if we continue to dwell in thought on this world, not of objects in the solidity with which language invests them, but of impressions, unstable, flickering, inconsistent, which burn and are extinguished with our consciousness of them, it contracts still further: the whole scope of observation is dwarfed into the narrow chamber of the individual mind.” (1998, 151).

10 Such nomenclature was not uncommon. Vicinus comments on intense homosocial friendships at Westfield College, founded in 1882: “women consistently spoke of their love in terms that replicated heterosexual love. Quite unselfconsciously women referred to their relationships as marriages, complete with the exchange of rings and promises of lifelong fidelity”; Vicinus concludes that, perhaps not always fully understood by some women themselves, “Sexual passion, if not physical sexuality, characterized a special friendship” (1985, 158).

11 The narrator adds in a postscript that if her reader is interested in learning more about St. Odile, “read Katherine Lee’s book, In the Alsatian Mountains, a travel guide complete with a table of expenses” (Levy 1884a, 335).

12 Quain 1828 [repr. 1864–1867].

13 Levy’s Ortrud does not share the villainy of Wagner’s Ortrud, who convinces Elsa to doubt Lohengrin, marries Telramund after Elsa refuses him, and leads her husband in a plot to gain the throne (Oxford Reference online).

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Linda K. Hughes

Linda K. Hughes, Addie Levy Professor of Literature, TCU, specializes in nineteenth-century literature and culture, gender and women’s studies, and transnationality. Victorian Women Writers and the Other Germany: Cross-Cultural Freedoms and Female Opportunity (Cambridge University Press, 2022) examines ten progressive women writers from Anna Jameson to Vernon Lee who engaged cultural difference and found newly discovered freedoms through travel, friendship networks, and intellectual inquiry. She has begun a hybrid cultural/personal biography of Amy Levy in the contexts of kindred groups, as in this NCC essay and a forthcoming George Eliot-George Henry Lewes Studies essay on Eliot’s literary legacies for Levy.