Shakespeare and Victorian Women

Much has been written on the cultural significance of Shakespeare, his influence on particular periods, and his appropriation and subsequent transformation. However, no book until now has specifically addressed the nature of the relationship between Shakespeare and Victorian women. In this book, Gail Marshall gives an account of the actresses who played an essential part in redeeming Shakespeare for the Victorian stage, the writers who embraced him as part of the texture of their own writing as well as their personal lives, and those women readers who, educated to be alert to the female voices of Shakespeare, often went on to re-read Shakespeare for their own ends. Dr Marshall argues that women form a fundamental part of the narrative of how the Victorian Shakespeare was made, and that translation, rather than terms such as appropriation or adaptation, is the most appropriate metaphor for understanding the symbiosis between Shakespeare and Victorian women.

Introduction; 1. Shakespeare and Victorian girls' education; 2. Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Shakespeare: translating the language of intimacy; 3. 'She had made him, as it were, the air she lived in': Shakespeare, Helen Faucit and Fanny Kemble; 4. George Eliot and Shakespeare: defamiliarising 'second nature'; 5. Socialism, nationalism and Stratford: Shakespeare and the New Woman at the fin de siècle; 6. Shakespeare and the actress in the 1890s.

This first full-length study of the influence of Shakespeare and his plays on Victorian women sheds light on the work of actresses and writers, the reading habits of women generally, and the education of girls in the nineteenth century. This book was first published in 2009.