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December 15, 2010
Colleen Denney Women, Portraiture and the Crisis of Identity in Victorian England: My Lady Scandalous Reconsidered Burlington: Ashgate, 2009. 274 pp.; 4 color ills.; 36 b/w ills. Cloth $99.95 (9780754668794)
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In her chapter on Emilia Francis (later, Lady Dilke), Colleen Denney writes that “Victorians were guilty for delighting in the saucy details of the scandal at the same time as they projected an outward shell of moralistic judgment” (86). The protagonists Denney selected for her perceptive narrative about “scandalous” women were born into the rapidly expanding middle classes: Mary Elizabeth Braddon (1835–1915), Lady Dilke (1840–1904), Millicent Garrett Fawcett (1847–1929), and Sarah Grand (1854–1943). This decision...