Coming together: Women's literary collaboration in Britain, 1885--1918 (Edith Oenone Somerville, Martin Ross, Michael Field, Vernon Lee, Elizabeth Robins, Ireland)

This dissertation interrogates the different histories and functions of women's literary partnerships through examination of late-Victorian collaborative life and work as "discursive sites of resistance." For Michael Field, Somerville and Ross, Vernon Lee, and Elizabeth Robins, collaboration enacts a series of politically fraught strategies, which I variously discuss as feminist, lesbian and/or queer. These strategies are performative; they call attention to how women's collaborative life and work denaturalizes contemporary discourse and negotiates many limitations of post-Enlightenment patriarchy: Cartesian subjectivity and solitary creativity; Industrial capitalism and alienated labor; and heterosexism. Thus, my study illustrates how same-sex dyads, in and against the discourses of this time, were able to materialize a creative, erotic, and politically critical subject through their authorial coupling.; Chapter one, From 'art and mystery' to Unnatural Economy: Of Process and Pleasure in Women's Collaborative Writing , sets the epistemological groundwork for an approach to 19th-century women's literary partnership as a performative strategy that redefines selfhood and authorship. Drawing from personal and published writing from all four partners, I show that women's collaborative writing processes problematize the ideologies of the writing industry under patriarchy by reconceptualizing authorial labor, economy, and marketplace. Chapter two, Looking Strategically: The Transgressive Aesthetics of "Beauty and Ugliness " and Sight and Song, juxtaposes 19th-century discussions of art and plagiarism with Vernon Lee and Kit Anstruther-Thomson's studies in psychological aesthetics and a collection of Michael Field's picture-poems. These texts employ a transgressive aesthetic that establishes or imagines a female spectator, creating spaces for women's voices and queer desire. Chapter three, Refusing to Perform: Performative Silences in A Question of Memory and Alan's Wife, contextualizes Michael Field's and Robins and Bell's plays within 19th-century discourses on hysteria and the representation of women on the Victorian stage. My readings consider what bodies reveal through the performance of silence and what drama can reveal about the social body through refusals of representation. Finally, chapter four, Collaborating with History: The Tragic and The Real Charlotte, examines Michael Field's historical drama and Somerville and Ross's novel in order to explore how "collaborating with history" produces role models, revises paradigms of femininity, and recuperates images of the violent or dangerous woman.