Serena Trowbridge is Professor in Pre-Raphaelite Studies at Birmingham City University. Serena is Chair and Vice-President of the Pre-Raphaelite Society, Senior Vice-President of the Birmingham & Midland Institute, and a Trustee of the William Morris Society. Publications include My Ladys Soul: The Poetry of Elizabeth Siddall (Victorian Secrets 2018) and The Poems of Evelyn Pickering De Morgan (Victorian Secrets 2022); ‘Elizabeth Siddall: Pre-Raphaelitism, Poetry, Prosody’ in Defining Pre-Raphaelite Poetics ed. Heather Bozant Witcher and Amy Kahrmann Huseby (Palgrave 2020) and Christina Rossetti’s Gothic (Bloomsbury 2013). She is currently working on an anthology of writing by Pre-Raphaelite women (Routledge), and has a forthcoming edited collection, Forgotten Women Pre-Raphaelites (University of Delaware Press).
Keynote bio: Serena Trowbridge is Professor of Pre-Raphaelite Studies at Birmingham City University. She is a writer and academic specialising in Pre-Raphaelitism in art and literature. Trowbridge is Vice-President and Chair of the Pre-Raphaelite Society, and Senior Vice-President at the Birmingham & Midland Institute, as well as a Trustee of the William Morris Society. She has published widely on ‘Pre-Raphaelite sisters’, including Elizabeth Siddall, Evelyn De Morgan, and Christina Rossetti.
The mid-Victorian salon at Little Holland House has long been associated with Sara Prinsep and the painter G F Watts, who lived and worked there for over two decades. This paper suggests that the salon functioned not simply as the achievement of a single hostess, but as a form of sororal cultural infrastructure shaped collectively by the Pattle sisters, whose shared domestic labour, sociability, and cosmopolitan background created an environment conducive to artistic exchange and professional visibility. Drawing on material presented in Women of Influence: The Pattle Sisters, it examines how creative output, particularly that of Watts, was enabled by female systems of facilitation. The paper also reflects on the curatorial challenge of interpreting such ‘invisible labour’ in an exhibition context, and considers how the environment fostered at Little Holland House anticipates later forms of salon culture, including those associated with Vanessa Bell and Virginia Woolf.
Bio: Corinna Henderson is Exhibitions Curator at Watts Gallery, where she curates exhibitions with a focus on nineteenth and early twentieth-century British art, working closely with the Gallery’s collections relating to George Frederic Watts and Mary Seton Watts. Her most recent curatorial project is Women of Influence: The Pattle Sisters.
Abstract: This talk focuses on the interconnection between familial, professional and political sisterhood in the nineteenth century. It highlights the prominence of sisters in Victorian culture, influenced by legal, social and religious discourses and debates of the period. It shows how women writers and artists worked together in sororal creative partnerships in order to develop their careers and support the women's suffrage movement, resulting in greater female empowerment at the fin de siecle.
Bio: Dr Lucy Ella Rose is a Lecturer in Victorian Literature at the University of Surrey. She specialises in nineteenth-century women's writing and creative partnerships, and is currently writing her second book on fin-de-siecle sisterhood.
Summary: Of the five Epps sisters, four were trained as artists: Laura Theresa Epps Alma-Tadema (1852-1909), Emily Epps Williams (1841-1912), Ellen Epps Gosse (1850-1929), and Amy Epps Pratt (1839-1913). These women were, by varying degrees, at the centre of a dynamic artistic milieu in Victorian Britain, connected by blood or marriage to two generations of prominent artists and artistic movements, from the Pre-Raphaelites to the Camden Town Group. However, their own artwork is little-studied or hardly traced. This talk will use a relational lens to begin to rehabilitate the work and lives of the Epps sisters through their relationships with each other, and with major artistic figures of the period.
Bio: Dr Eliza Goodpasture is Research Fellow, 20th-Century British Drawings, at the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford. She received her PhD from the University of York, where her research examined friendship between women as a form of creative collaboration. She has worked with museums and galleries around the UK and US, including Tate Britain, the National Gallery, York Art Gallery, the Charleston Trust, the Clarke Institute of Art at Williams College, and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum.
Abstract: How significant were friendships to Pre-Raphaelite women artists and writers? How did these connections play a formative role in their work? This paper turns attention to the self-proclaimed ‘Sisters in Art’, a group of like-minded women who were directly affiliated with the Pre-Raphaelite circle from the late 1840s. Developed out of long-term friendships, the group’s core members were Anna Mary Howitt (later Watts), Barbara Leigh Smith (later Bodichon), Bessie Parkes (later Belloc), with other notable members such as the artists Eliza Fox, Elizabeth Siddall and Jane Benham featuring at different stages. These women established their own women’s network that was built on creative and domestic friendships, as well as political alliances. Together, they utilised these friendships to challenge the masculine structures of the art community, and eventually wider aspects of Victorian culture.
Bio: Alex Round is a nineteenth-century art and literary historian based in Birmingham, UK. She was recently awarded her PhD in English and Art History at Birmingham City University, and received a fully-funded scholarship from Midlands4Cities. Her doctoral thesis, titled ‘Sisters in Art’: Reassessing the Pre-Raphaelite Sisterhood, examined female friendships formed between Pre-Raphaelite women and the formative role that these friendships have played on their creative production, with a particular focus on Anna Mary Howitt, Barbara Bodichon and Bessie Parkes, among others. Alex is also a co-creator of the hugely successful Pre-Raphaelite Society Podcast and Graduate Network Strand, as well as being an elected trustee of the Birmingham and Midland Institute. Alex is currently working on a collective biography of Howitt, Bodichon and Parkes, as well as prospective projects on the collaborative productions of Rebecca and Simeon Solomon.
Abstract: This paper will address the construction of Sapphic ‘sororities’ and ‘sisterhoods’ across the long nineteenth century, as authors and artists drew on Sappho as the original Western figure of sisterly and lesbian communities. I will use Elaine Marks’s concept of the ‘Sappho Model’ and Adrienne Rich’s ‘lesbian continuum’ as a theoretical framework to acknowledge appropriations of Sappho through the century. Sappho has been endlessly re-imagined as a divine muse for radical feminist and queer adaptation and translation projects. Sappho has also been recognised as the classical leader of an ancient ‘Lesbian’ sorority. Offering ‘queer’ readings of creative female communities, I argue that art, literature and salon cultures in the long nineteenth century continue an established tradition of Sapphic ‘sisterhoods’ that has spanned centuries.
Bio: Casey Maeve is a self-funded second-year PhD student in the Department of English Literature at the University of Birmingham. This PhD project is analysing Sapphic poetry and Sapphic poets from the mid-late nineteenth to early twentieth century, identifying and drawing connections between the ‘Sapphic literary networks.’ As of February 2023, Casey has been a Lecturer at the University of Worcester, working within the Institute of Humanities and Arts.