By examining literary portraits of the woman as artist, Linda M. Lewis traces the matrilineal inheritance of four Victorian novelists and poets: George Eliot, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Geraldine Jewsbury, and Mrs. Humphry Ward. She argues that while the male Romantic artist saw himself as god and hero, the woman of genius lacked a guiding myth until Germaine de Sta?l and George Sand created one. The methodology of this book includes myth criticism, feminist commentary, and psychoanalytic theory, but its strength lies in Lewis's close reading of the intertextuality of ten literary works.
