“‘In the garb of ancient Greece’: Late-Victorian Women Poets and the Gendering of Classicism”.

When Augusta Webster (1837-1894) published the dramatic monologue Medea (1870) the frst college for women in Cambridge – namely Girton – had been open for hardly a year. She could not attend university, but like Amy Levy (1861-1889) she decided to engage herself in the study of Latin and Greek. At the time Classics as a discipline was undergoing a process of redefnition which had started in the 1860s and was to continue in the following decades. Between the 1870s and the 1890s Victorian women who pursued an intellectual career in the classics had to contend with a double prejudice. The frst concerned the supposed weakness of the female mind, which would prevent them from attaining ‘serious’ knowledge; moreover, a second specifc limitation impinged upon their access to classical education, for it was widely regarded as an exclusively male feld. Augusta Webster and Amy Levy approached ancient philosophy and literature – especially Greek – in a controversial period of transition, when Antiquity was becoming a site of contention between a male dominated centre and cultural margins. Their poetical revisionism testifes to late-Victorian women’s “movement into the classical tradition” (Olverson 2010: 17) and their creative rewriting of it from a (proto-) feminist perspective.