‘The hope of the future lies greatly in the fact that woman is now beginning to take her place’, wrote Mary Watts in her diary (1893: 4 April). A year later, feminist writer Sarah Grand coined the term ‘New Woman’ and wrote, ‘women generally are becoming conscious that some great change is taking place in their position’ (Grand 1894: 707). An increasing preoccupation with woman's place – and specifically, the evolving role and shifting socio-political position of women – is perceptible in much art and literature of the later nineteenth century, the period that engendered active feminism in the form of the women's suffrage movement. Woman's place was a primary focus of Victorian–Edwardian feminist discourse, and remains central to present-day feminism. This book shows how neglected nineteenth-century women writers and artists transgressed traditional female spheres and restrictive feminine norms in their professional creative practices and unconventional creative partnerships with men, and how their literary and visual texts can be read as sites of struggle against – rather than submission to – patriarchy. These marginalised Victorian women, traditionally defined as subordinate gender ‘others’ in relation to their famous husbands, can be seen as ‘significant others’ who were not passive and peripheral but rather active and influential in their creative partnerships as well as in contemporary debates, through which they achieved and promoted greater personal and political empowerment and freedom.

This book explores the role of women in the artistic and literary professions, the representation of women in art and literature, and the rise of feminism through these discourses. It focuses on two conjugal creative partnerships of artists, writers and suffragists: Mary Seton Watts (1849–1938) and George Frederic Watts (1817–1904); and Evelyn Mary De Morgan (1855–1919) and William Frend De Morgan (1839–1917). Collectively their lives coincided with the rise of the women's movement, from its embryonic stage in the midnineteenth century to the later phase of militant suffragism preceding the First World War; Evelyn saw the franchise extended to certain women in 1918, while Mary lived to see citizenship rights granted to women on the same terms as men in 1928. Witnessing such advances inevitably impacted their lives and works.