‘Cleverly Drawn’: Oscar Wilde, Charles Ricketts, and the Art of the Woman's World.

This paper offers a new examination of the influential women's magazine, theWoman's World (1887–90), and Oscar Wilde's editorship thereof. Previous studies have focused on the magazine's importance as a venue for promoting proto-feminist writing and for enabling Wilde to boost his professional cachet through editorial work, but the aesthetic aims and execution of theWoman's World merit further analysis. The Woman's World reveals how male artists negotiated aesthetics and Aestheticism between themselves within its pages, as well as how they presented it to the publication's assumed audience of women. This paper particularly centres on the magazine's role in establishing the professional relationship between Wilde and Charles Ricketts, later the designer and illustrator of some of Wilde's most important texts, while simultaneously considering how Ricketts's work furthered the artistic and intellectual instruction Wilde hoped to offer the magazine's readers. Case studies of several of Ricketts's illustrations demonstrate the types of visual reading that the Woman's World seemed to espouse, and which worked in tandem with the textual contents to encourage women to develop critical reading skills. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]