Tennyson's Women

"But what is time given us for," asked Laura, "except to enjoy ourselves? I mean a lady's time. Gentlemen and poor people are different." — Laura Courtenay in Elizabeth Missing Sewell's Gertrude (1845)

The Lady of Shalott by J W Waterhouse (1888)

It was good to see ytou in class today, and thank you for those last essays. Hopefully the next ones will be a little easier to write after today's lesson. Remember that if you look at the assessment objectives, it will make it much easier to see where there might be gaps in your work.

The following links you might find helpful when researching ideas. Most important is The Victorian Web, which is a site which has a huge amount of solid, reputable information about Victorian literature and culture on it. Though you can wander around it as you please, I shall give you some signposts to save you time, for instance for some interesting information on Tennyson, you can go to the central Tennyson index  while for broader matters of gender, you can find plenty of information here. Those of you who were asking about the details of the pictures we looked at can find them--and many more in this section on the illustrations to 'The Lady of Shallot'. If you are wondering where to start when connecting 'The Lady of Shallot' to 'Mariana', then this short essay might give you some ideas of where to start. Similarly there is an extract from the excellent essay by Elizabeth Nelson  "Tennyson and the Ladies of Shalott," from Ladies of Shalott: A Victorian Masterpiece and its Contexts, Ed. George P. Landow, Brown U.: 1979.

Another interesting part of the site is the questions area, where it suggests some ideas for exploring texts. If you look at the Reading and Discussion questions for Tennyson's Poems, you'll find a whole section on 'The Lady of Shalott' and Mariana' which will perhaps start you tihinking about new ideas to explore.

If you're being more adventurous, here, also, is the list of articles I mentioned in the lesson. You might be able to find them in JSTOR or in the county library:

• Jeffers, Thomas L. “Nice Threads: Tennyson’s Lady of Shalott as Artist.” Yale Review 89 (2001): 54-68.
• Showalter, Elaine . “Victorian Women and Menstruation.” Suffer and Be Still: Women in the Victorian Age. Ed. Martha Vicinus. Indiana: Indiana University Press, 1972. 38-44.
• Vicinus, Martha, ed. Suffer and Be Still: Women in the Victorian Age. Indiana: Indiana University Press, 1972.
• Wright, Jane Cooke. “A reflection on fiction and art in ‘The Lady of Shalott’.” Victorian Poetry (2003): 54-68.

Happy writing!