Abstract
A considerable number of women were active in every phase of the Pre-Raphaelite movement. Some, as was the case for Elizabeth Siddal and Lucy Madox Brown, incorporated the ideas of their husbands and fathers into their own art. Others were deeply influenced by the freshness of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, by the resourceful, pious and naturalistic vision of its members and followers. At the same time, the condition of Victorian women was more than ambiguous – women had no right to vote but could open their own commerce, were published and read, and their daughters would soon know Margaret Fuller. However, what characterizes the period is a particular dichotomy of virtue and vice – that ambivalent tension residing in the conflict between the prototypes of the “perfect woman” and the “seductive siren” – and the corresponding birth of feminine self-awareness. Throughout the Victorian age and well into the first decades of the 20th century, there is this continual effort to find the nature of femininity, to reflect upon the mystery of woman and to redefine her role in the modern world. The study of the attempts of women-painters to represent themselves, or rather to depict the very concept of femininity, is therefore all the more fascinating.
