Ginger Vooys

Publication Date

12-1999

Advisor(s) - Committee Chair

Karen Schneider, James Flynn, Charmaine Mosby

Comments

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Degree Program

Department of English

Degree Type

Master of Arts

Abstract

First, who is Violent Hunt? She was a prominent Edwardian novelist and journalist whose fictional heroines represent the emerging new woman of the modern era. Known for her tragic Realism and her early psychological fiction, she is a transitional figure in England’s conversion from Victorian to Modern – both personally and professionally. Yet her name and works do not survive in the British canon. Why? Scholars point primarily to her penchant for autobiographical fiction and her unconventional lifestyle. For example, her scandalous roman a clef, Sooner or Later, deals with the sexual psychology of the mistress; and her memoir, The Flurried Years, rationalizes her embattled, highly publicized relationship with Ford Madox Ford. As a result, in the minds of the British public and literary historians, Hunt’s identity is subjugated to that of Ford, Wilde, Wells, Maugham, James, Conrad, and other males novelists who were either her lovers or her friends. Consequently, she loses her status as a literary figure and becomes a literary footnote.

In this thesis, I examine the life and works of Violet Hunt from a biographical literary perspective to determine why her work has been forgotten and what factors contributed to the ruin of her personal life and literary reputation. I analyze four of Hunt’s late works, The Doll (a feminist novel in which the heroine capitulates), Their Hearts (an autobiographical novel in which three Victorian daughters come of age), The Wife of Rossetti (a biographical account of the Pre-Raphaelite objectification of women), and Hunt’s memoir (her defense of her own capitulation.) I also demonstrate a pattern of disillusionment and thwarted emancipation in the characters of her earlier fiction and provide a sample of Hunt’s temporary novelistic attempt to redress the situation, by creating cruel female characters and victimized males in her Tales of the Uneasy.

To understand Hunt’s unresolved conflict, I consult works by Douglas Goldring, Arthur Mizener, Alan Judd, and Robert and Marie Secor, but rely primarily on recent publications by Barbara Belford and Joan Hardwick which have resulted from the belated discovery of Hunt’s diaries and personal papers. In addition, I use the works by Peter Stansky and James Longenbach for elucidation about the early modern period. Finally, I rely on additional sources to demonstrate the effect that the Pre-Raphaelite tradition had on Hunt’s mindset.

Violet Hunt used her intimate insights into the highly conflicted transformation of the “new woman,” from Victorian to Edwardian to Modern, to create tragic female heroines – women who collude in their own annihilation. In her final work, The Wife of Rossetti, by examining the objectification of Elizabeth Eleanor Siddall (a Pre-Raphaelite artist’s model), Hunt comes to terms with woman’s tendency to voluntarily subjugate herself and her career to the man in her life.

Disciplines

Arts and Humanities | Creative Writing | English Language and Literature | Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies | Literature in English, British Isles | Women's Studies

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