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'Obviously, I'm not managing ... too well these days, Spiro.' 'Why?' I suspected he knew very well but he wanted me to say it. 'Maybe because Lori Petersen was a [...]

Lesa Scholl. Translation, Authorship and the Victorian Professional Woman: Charlotte Bronte, Harriet Martineau and George Eliot. London: Ashgate, 2011. 222 pp.; US $99.95 ISBN 9781409426530 The novel looms large in [...]

Scholarly tradition has consistently regarded Ellena Rosalba, the heroine of British novelist Ann Radcliffe's The Italian (1796), as the passive and naïve victim to the Gothic tyrannies of that novel's patriarchal class system. Reading her first and foremost as an assailed heroine and tractable object of masculine desire, scholars have overlooked the subtle material tactics which Ellena deploys in order to participate in the Neapolitan market and define her subjectivity, despite her social marginality as an unmarried, orphaned, and “friendless” young woman of only moderate economic means. The present paper considers the ways in which Ellena's relation to and creation of material culture and, particularly, art objects offer her means to economic independence, personal agency, and self-expression as a working artist. This paper argues that Ellena's active engagement with art and, in particular, domestic arts such as needlework, sketching, painting, and music, disrupt the gendered hierarchies implied by Burkean aesthetic categorizations of the sublime and the beautiful. Ellena's relation to the domestic arts and the material economies of daily life, the author suggests, here affords the female-gendered subject access to a decidedly democratized mode of transcendental experience which partakes equally of the sublime and the beautiful. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]