Gender, Art and Death

Discusses women and issues of gender from the Restoration to Romanticism, examining the complex connections between art and life as revealed by women authors. Topics discussed include the creation of the artist in the work of Aphra Behn and the vexed attitude of Virginia Woolf to Jane Austen.

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In this volume, Janet Todd discusses women and issues of gender from the Restoration to Romanticism, and the staging of the self that is necessarily a part of the assertiveness of writing. She investigates the complex and often cruel intertwinings of art and life as revealed in women authors, and the fascination with culturally privileged art and with heroic death, both of which are encoded as simultaneously "masculine" and beyond gender. Among the topics discussed are the creation of the artist in the work of Aphra Behn; self-fashionings of transgressive 18th-century women; Mary Wollstonecraft's suicide attempts; and the vexed attitude of Virginia Woolf to Jane Austen. An introductory essay discusses history, memory, feminist literary biography and the New Historicism.