HAD SHE LIVED A longer life, Joanna Mary Boyce (later Wells) would have made a notable mark on the fine art of her time – not just because of her talent, nor because of her connection with some of the most notable mid-Victorian artists, but because the time was right. Born in 1831, she grew up into a period dominated by the ‘woman question’, and, while all three of the painters to whom this book is dedicated operated in this matrix of social, political and economic challenge, debate and change in relation to women's professional roles, it was she for whom this moment was meant. This was the point at which a talented, capable and articulate middle-class woman could break through and come to the fore, claiming her just reward. So, resisting the temptation provoked by her untimely death to ponder on what Boyce might have been, this essay examines what she was – a woman of her time (Figure 10.1).

Perhaps it goes without saying that middle-class women's lives in mid-nineteenth-century Britain were shaped by their families, and specifically by the ambitions of their parents, the company their parents kept and the opportunities for experience that were allowed in their journey from infancy to adulthood. In imagining Boyce as a child, one amongst five children in a financially comfortable household, we see her father George John Boyce, fond and encouraging, who was glad to help her talents develop, but who died when she was only twenty-one; and her mother Anne Boyce (née Price), whose grand-daughter wrote of her ‘emotional and uncontrolled nature’ and whom the family's latter-day biographer, Sue Bradbury, describes as ‘of an emotionally demanding disposition’. A good marriage was perhaps the chief point on which the parents’ aims for their two daughters would have agreed.

Marriage was one of the most prominent topics in the emerging discourse on the position of women: referred to as the ‘woman question’, this was fairly established by the end of the 1840s as a huge contemporary issue. No family of financially comfortable, literate, sociable Londoners such as the Boyces could have failed to notice this matter as it shifted from an element of radical conversation to a central plank of modernity.