Romantic Hellenism and Women Writers

Romantic Hellenism and Women Writers challenges the High-Romantic narrative of English classicism. Scholarship on this subject typically construes the Greek influence as masculine in orientation and bound to institutions of learning and authority that excluded women. This limited version of Hellenism does not account for the popular contexts of Greek revivalism, most notably among women writers and readers, in fashionable magazines, gift books and annuals. The culture of Hellenism thrived in these venues, not as the familiar monumental heritage but as an ephemeral Greek ideal, as alluring and evanescent as the Sappho-knot hairstyle or the high-waisted dress à la Grecque. This emphasis on ephemerality in women''s reinventions of Greece betrayed a distrust of liberal rhetoric that upheld the principles of democracy while ignoring the social inequities of the classical world. Although women promoted a Greek aesthetic, many also rejected Greece''s misogynistic legacy of slaves, concubines and abandoned wives.