This book identifies and rectifies important omissions in the existing public material on the Wattses and the De Morgans in its focus on the historically neglected female figures, its exploration and comparison of their largely unexplored creative partnerships, and its feminist analysis of their understudied works. It shows how Victorian women repositioned themselves in relation to men as successful professional writers and artists as well as creative partners and ‘significant others’ rather than servile wives, secretaries or muses. It thus challenges ideologically dominant images, ideals and stereotypes of Victorian women – and specifically, longstanding misperceptions of Mary and Evelyn – as submissive or subordinate. These women achieved and promoted greater social, political and economic freedom, empowerment and equality through their professional creative practices and anti-patriarchal partnerships, transgressing, subverting and deconstructing oppressive masculinist binary structures which served to sustain sexual difference through separate spheres and gendered activities. This book shows women – traditionally the ‘repressed of culture’ (Cixous 1976: 878) – to have been active and assertive participants in the cultural production of art and literature as well as in progressive political movements that developed over the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, revealing a rich female and early feminist culture of the time.

While Elaine Showalter identifies ‘feminine’ (about 1840–80) and ‘feminist’ (about 1880–1920) as phases in the evolution of women's literature (1979: 35–6), these can also effectively be applied to the evolution of women's art, and the chronological limits can be redefined to show how the ‘feminist phase’ began before 1880 – as women began to enter artistic and literary professions en masse for the first time as well as public debates about the place of women through artistic and literary discourses. During the second half of the nineteenth century, the ‘feminist content’ of (that is, the protest against patriarchy in) art and literature was not just ‘oblique, displaced’ (1979: 35) and subtextual (as in the ‘feminine phase’) but also increasingly overt and direct. The creative practices and works of the women discussed in this book were innovative rather than imitative (imitation being associated with the ‘feminine’ phase in Showalter's theory).