Review of Kimberly VanEsveld Adams' “Our Lady of Victorian Feminism: The Madonna in the Work of Anna Jameson, Margaret Fuller, and George Eliot” (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2001)

Abstract

As Kimberly VanEsveld Adams states in Our Lady of Victorian Feminism: The Madonna in the Work of Anna Jameson, Margaret Fuller, and George Eliot, nineteenthcentury feminism and feminist movements have received relatively little critical attention. Her book, which combines the critical insights of feminist religious studies and literary criticism, presents a good attempt at reversing this trend. Focusing on the works of Jameson, Fuller, and Eliot, Adams evaluates the Madonna in nineteenth-century art history and literature as a representative of female empowerment made possible by means of the sexual and psychic freedoms of the virgin state.