Abstract
Copious geographies of nineteenth-century London spectacle have been mapped following different scales and criteria. In this article, I invite readers to scrutinise London’s entertainment industry in 1893 focusing on the venues where modern reconfigurations and adaptations of Greek and Roman mythology by women were first staged. Such a map reveals microhistories of the streets, theatres, pleasure gardens and concert halls, where women as creators and agents of the classical revival played an essential role that has generally been forgotten by theatre historians and classical reception studies. As I aim to demonstrate, this new and gendered cartography challenges the notion of a classical repertoire and the boundaries between the popular and the legitimate.
Copious geographies of nineteenth-century London spectacle have been mapped following different scales and criteria. Bartlett’s The Illustrated Map of London (1867?), for example, put together theatres, saloons and other venues for entertainment with palaces and gardens that had an architectural appeal for tourists. 1 More recently, Jacky Bratton’s history of the making of the West End suggests several kinds of mapping that include the hermeneutic experience of walking the city of London. 2 Bartlett’s map and Bratton’s study reveal how the various ways of viewing, mapping and experiencing the city are not objective and innocuous representations of spatial relations at all. Maps encode spatial relations that ‘are laden with emotion, politics, and belief systems, even when they purport to be simple visual aids that provide a better understanding of the world’, 3 because ‘space is political and ideological’. 4 If we take for granted Henri Lefebvre’s ideas that maps always represent a certain form of power to make sense of the world, the process of mapping correspondingly has the power to bring to light other challenging perspectives.
Glancing at a map in its comprehensive totality allows us to make sense, in detail and as a whole, of the geographical space inhabited. It, therefore, entails an experience that ‘topographically orders visible space within a set of geographical relations’ 5 and is a ‘phantasmagoria’ 6 by which space is interpreted by the subjective associations of the observer. 7 That is to say, we discover its space through exploring and gradually experiencing the city. 8 This is related to Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s concept of ‘orientation’ in space, which is not, he contests, ‘a contingent property of the object’, but ‘the means by which I recognized the object and by which I am conscious of it as an object’. 9 Of course, the same object can be read in different orientations, yet these will always be conditioned by a particular mindset.
Nineteenth-century London offered city-dwellers an effervescent and vibrant web of imaginative interactions and experiences with countless invisible maps to unveil. 10 One of these invisible microcosms was a ubiquitous obsession with the classical past as a fertile source of socio-cultural and artistic models. The cultural map of classical reminiscences in nineteenth-century London that has been drawn by critics commonly concentrates on male agents of culture and female objects of representation. By way of an example, the pre-eminence of male artists, both at the exhibition rooms and at the schools of the Royal Academy of Arts and the National Gallery, was perpetuated by a history of the arts lasting until the 1980s in which the female artist was almost invisible in contrast to female models. 11 A further Pygmalionesque transmission of the Classics in nineteenth-century London is manifested in the legitimate dramas, operas and ballets that were staged at Drury Lane, Covent Garden and Her Majesty’s Theatres, penned by a male mastermind and performed by admired ballerinas, actresses and sopranos. 12 Between the 1830s and the 1870s, classical burlesque – again a predominantly male-authored genre – filled the pit and galleries of the so-called minor theatres, where actresses in breeches roles were a main attraction. 13 Classical themes in the architecture of the venues proved that not only the various forms of entertainment, but also the buildings that housed such entertainment, were strongly reminiscent of a glorious and celebrated foreign past culture as recreated by men. 14
An alternative map of the London theatre industry in the fin-de-siècle reveals microhistories of the streets, theatres, pleasure gardens and concert halls, where women as creators and agents of the classical revival played an essential role that has generally been forgotten by theatre historians and classical reception studies. A major cause for this exclusion is the gendering of classical studies as masculine in the long nineteenth century. 15 This, nonetheless, should not be a hindrance to a gendered re-mapping of the transmission and reception of the Classics in London’s entertainment scene because, as Isobel Hurst contends, the ways in which women ‘encountered the ancient languages, in varied environments with different access to texts and languages and tuition [if any], made women’s responses to the Classics distinctive’. 16
Women’s ‘distinctive’ ways of approaching the Classics throughout the nineteenth century have been scrutinised both by classicists and researchers from various disciplines. For example, Yopie Prins (1999), Isobel Hurst (2006) and Jennifer Wallace (2000, 2011) excel in finding a place for women in classical reception from the perspective of two major genres – poetry and the novel – yet they overlook one of the most fruitful cultural industries of the period: entertainment. 17 By way of an example, Hurst maps the classical influences and education of women over the century through their biographical and fictional representations. 18 Nevertheless, she only cursorily considers the links between women, drama and the Classics through the Greek Plays performed in women’s colleges during the late nineteenth century where women, she claims, ‘were initially active in the production of classical drama’. 19 The performance of Classics at women’s colleges indeed meant a turning point for the ‘institutionalized exclusion’ of women in the classical tradition argued by Fowler; however, this was by no means the first time women were producing classically inspired spectacles during the century. 20 Cassandra, a monodrama by Elizabeth Cobbold that was first performed at the European Saloon in London in 1821 and Mrs Warton’s classically inspired shows at the ‘Walhalla’ in the 1840s are two earlier examples. 21 Such cases, together with the increasing engagement of women in the theatrical industry in the late Victorian period, provide the grounds for the development of the female-authored drama of the 1890s that informs the ‘distinctive map’ under discussion in this article.
Anna Farkas has recently explored the ways in which the amount of women ‘writing for the stage surged in the 1890s’, 22 when the numbers made up ‘just over half of the total of women’s writing for the theatre in the nineteenth century’. 23 This coincided in time with the dawn of a gendered late-Victorian Hellenism, which favoured women’s active engagement with classical texts through translation, adaptation, editing and other cultural forms that eventually nurtured the theatrical industry of the period. 24 As a result, the volume of women writers who relied on the Classics to put on their shows multiplied by the 1890s.
Considering the work by these women allows me to draft an ‘intertheatrical’ map of the various venues – from the Somerville Club to the Hammersmith Palace of Varieties – where refigurations of classical mythology by women were put on, and to use this gendered cartography to read the entertainment space in the city of London. It also helps to depict a new topography by which former preconceptions of the theatrical city landscape are re-read and reinterpreted. The results unearth exceptional associations in which women’s views of their own individuality and citizenship are questioned. The map of the shows of London that I draw here, therefore, aims at filling a void in the history of London’s nineteenth-century entertainment industry to demonstrate the valuable – yet silenced – contribution of women to the transmission of the Classics in the period. For this purpose, I focus the gendered lens of classical reception on the theatrical microhistories of the year 1893, which serve as a sample of this ‘distinctive’ and ‘re-oriented’ map of London.
Women, Theatre and the Classics in 1893
As Linda Hutcheon contends, the ‘Victorians had a habit of adapting just about everything’, 25 and in their obsession with the classical past, the Greek and Roman world became ‘a deeply privileged and deeply contested arena for cultural (self-) expression’. 26 A number of publications and events in 1893 that relate to antiquity have entered contemporary discussion of the nineteenth century: for example, Walter Pater’s Plato and Platonism, which was soon welcomed by scholars from the two sides of the Atlantic; G. A. Henty’s novel Berie the Briton, which associated British heroism with Imperial Rome; and even the Westminster Play put on at the boys’ school that year, Trinummus by Plautus. 27 By contrast, other less patriarchally focused approaches that also contributed to the classical sediment of the year have remained unnoticed. For example, other lesser-known female voices within London’s entertainment industry and the various sculptures by women that were exhibited at the Royal Academy of Arts. 28 In order to put a few of these relatively unknown classical receptions back on the map of London spectacle, I propose as a starting point the great theatrical event of the 1893 season: the production of Arthur Wing Pinero’s The Second Mrs Tanqueray. 29
The unprecedented success of The Second Mrs Tanqueray boosted the popularity of the fallen woman play in the 1890s, which help shape the fin-de-siècle sex-problem play. 30 The male-dominated institution of marriage was being openly contested in the public forum of theatre and Mrs Tanqueray shared the stages with other no less provoking plays: Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll’s House and Oscar Wilde’s A Woman of No Importance. 31 They all placed the focus on unsettling gender determinism and social roles, and this is also the path that the women considered in this article followed in their approach to the Classics. The race of unconventional, emancipated female characters that dominated London’s theatrical industry in 1893 was not an isolated phenomenon. As I aim to demonstrate, a variety of women writers, actresses and producers relied on the Classics from Greece and Rome to debate topical issues about women. To comprehend the invisible semiotic and hermeneutic threads that link the women and spaces that I scrutinise here, I propose abandoning traditional Cartesian divisions of London’s entertainment industry – West v. East End, legitimate v. illegitimate – and open up new horizons focused on their ‘intertheatrical’ relations.
Bratton’s ‘intertheatrical’ readings allow us to retrieve the historical contexts and resonances that cut across the various dramatic genres performed at the venues considered. According to Bratton, the ‘intertheatrical’ entails an awareness of the elements and interactions that make up the whole web of mutual understanding between potential audiences and their players, a sense of … knowingness, about playing that spans a lifetime or more and that is activated for all participants during the performance event.
32
The Somerville Club was a club for women that opened in London in 1878. Associated with the Fabians, it was an invaluable social centre that attracted members of all classes to discuss the pressing issues of the time. 33 It had developed out of the Ladies’ Institute and housed an ‘ample reading room with newspapers and periodicals as well as a free lending library’ 34 with a ‘liberal supply of papers and magazines’. 35 The club was based in 231 Oxford Street, London ‘above an ABC cafeteria’; in 1887, it re-established itself as the New Somerville Club and by 1898 had relocated to 19a Hanover Square, London. 36 The club hosted the monthly meetings of the Sunday Shakespeare Society, which gathered to study one Shakespearean play each month; 37 weekly winter lectures, and an occasional ‘Social Evening’ on Tuesdays where various amateur performances were staged, as well as concerts and recitations by well-known performers. One such social evening witnessed the first staging of Olympus by Christina Dening.
On 21 February 1893, Olympus was put on at the club as part of a triple bill with Dening’s own An Awful Experience and Training a Husband. 38 The cast included Dening in the title role; Miss Bass as Phoebe and Mr Louis Godfrey as Lydus and, according to one critic at the Era, the performance ‘had something of the character of a costume recital’ with only ‘a couple of curtailed windows’ as scenery. 39 The airs and songs were composed by Miss Isabel Hearne. Olympus was restaged at Westminster Town Hall 40 (later Caxton Hall in Caxton Street) 41 on 12 May 1893 together with Dening’s Justice and, again, the duologue Training a Husband, in aid of the Metropolitan Association for Befriending Young Servants (MABYS) 42 on the date of its annual meeting at the Egyptian Hall. 43 MABYS had been founded in 1875 for the aftercare of poorer girls who came from the Poor Law Schools and it aimed at providing them with training, lodging houses and respectable jobs in domestic service. The cast in the Hall was the same as at the Somerville Club except for the role of Lydus, who was this time performed by Mr Knox Orde. The Era reviewed the Westminster performance with a satiric allusion to its representation of Olympus, which, even if it was far more complex than it had been at the Somerville, ‘resembled a landscape in Egypt’. 44 The topic of the two bills was undoubtedly of interest to the audiences both at the Somerville and at the Westminster Hall as one of the major objectives of the Club and of MABYS was the position of women in society. 45
The only remaining copy of Olympus is in the manuscript appended to Justice in the Lord Chamberlain’s Collection (Add. MS 53526J), which was licensed to be performed at the Westminster Theatre Hall. 46 No separate copy for Olympus is registered in the collection. The length of the manuscript is thirty-three folios written in black ink on one-sided, blue-coloured quartos. The play is a mythological entertainment on the mortal love of the shepherdess Phoebe and Lydus, which is envied by Héra, the main character in the play, as performed by Dening. 47 Héra laments the idleness of immortality and the ever-lasting nature of immortal love, which she contrasts with the ‘interest and merriment’ of transient mortal love. 48 The classical imprint of the play is less distinct here than in other contemporary classically inspired entertainments of the period, yet it tackles a highly topical issue not only for the audiences at Somerville but also for city theatregoers in 1893: the institution of marriage. 49 The topic recurs in Dening’s writings for women’s clubs, which, at the time, were in the spotlight for the ‘Woman Question’. For example, in November 1893, Dening put on Mistakes, an overt critique of the institution of marriage and the state of neglect of abandoned wives, at the Pioneer Club in Piccadilly. 50 A reviewer at the Era condemned Dening’s attachment to the radical Pioneer, which he considered detrimental for a woman with ‘a very pretty wit, good dramatic instinct, and the literary faculty evidently well cultivated’. 51 Dening’s plays seem to have been granted special recognition among the various entertainments at Somerville, as very few other performances at the club received such detailed reviews in the sources consulted for this article. However, to understand the relevance of Olympus for the development of the thesis that I put forward here, various other social and intertheatrical cartographies should be inspected.
As noted above, both at the Somerville and at the Westminster Hall, Olympus was one of the three short pieces of an evening entertainment. For the Somerville, Dening chose to submit Olympus together with An Awful Experience and Training a Husband to public inspection. The curtain-raiser – An Awful Experience – was criticised for its unsophisticated plot, which revolved around the humorous experiences of two women with ghosts and spiritualism. 52 For the amusement of the female audiences, the short duologue Training a Husband foregrounded the clumsiness of husbands in the character of Cuthbert, who takes on domestic duties while his wife, Angelica, an emancipated woman, writes lectures on the woman question. For the Westminster Hall performance, Dening substituted An Awful Experience for Justice, in which she challenged the traditional social mores with the character of Mrs Aylward − the wife of a Farmer Aylward performed by Dening − who refuses to return home when her husband wrongly accuses her of infidelity. The triple bill at the Hall underscored the changing situation of women at the time and counterbalanced the monotony of the immortals in Olympus, which Héra laments as follows: ‘How depressing it is to know that everything will go on very much as it is now for ever –and ever- and ever!’. 53 It also responded to the new legislation on marriage, which widened the participation of women in society and was the object of numerous articles and pamphlets published in the same year. 54
The passing of the Married Women’s Property Act in December 1893 sparked vigorous debate on enfranchisement and the rights of women. The act completed the 1882 legislation, which altered the rule of coverture by which married women’s legal identities rested on those of their husbands and allowed married women control of their own property. As property owners, the Local Government Act, which was passed only one year later, in 1894, entitled women to vote in local elections. The ‘intertheatrical’ threads that link Olympus with the social scene in 1893 prove that, even though the piece was far from being politically engaged, the audiences it was addressed to were in the centre of the emancipation debates. They were therefore, ready to read their own destinies in Héra’s complaints (she was herself strongly associated with marriage through her paradigmatic union with Zeus): ‘Now the shepherds and shepherdesses down in the plains below there-how different their life is!’ … ‘I should like to find a mortal who was very deep in love, and ask him how he should like to love the same lady for a hundred thousand years or so!’ 55
Christina Dening was a lesser-known playwright of the amateur and independent circles. 56 She, consequently, epitomises the many invisible voices argued by Kate Newey to have been ‘shrouded by … the material practices of the London theatre industry … Victorian gender ideology’, ‘a practice of theatre historiography’ and ‘the scholarly discipline of Victorian Studies which has consistently ignored the theatre as a significant element of nineteenth-century culture’. 57 Details on Dening’s biography, therefore, are scant and may be established only through indirect sources. 58 Her career was truncated by a sudden early death in her late thirties, so it is also difficult to predict whether her plays would have had an impact beyond the amateur stage of her time or not. 59 Olympus is the only classically inspired play written by Dening that I have found so far in her short career, yet it serves as a case in point to illustrate the persistent appropriation by women of a traditionally male-dominated realm to explore their artistic voices.
Only one month before the Somerville performance, Stuart Ogilvie’s adaptation of Charles Kingsley’s novel Hypatia had been put on at the Haymarket Theatre. The play dramatises the major events that lead to the tragic ending of Hypatia, ‘the pagan philosopher’, 60 and the seduced monk Philammon within the context of the conflict between Christianity and paganism in Early Christian Alexandria. The anti-semitic and anti-Christian tone of the novel were downplayed this time by the visual focus of the play, 61 which featured costumes and stage designs by Royal Academician Lawrence Alma-Tadema. 62 The classically inspired networks of the play have been scrutinised by Jeffrey Richards and others, yet further intertheatrical associations may establish new connections with other classical receptions. 63
The cast for Ogilvie’s Hypatia included Charlotte E. Morland in the role of the slave Barea. Morland had been a regular performer at the social evening of the Somerville Club between 1889 and 1891. 64 She had won fame as an actress working in the service of Herbert Beerbohm Tree at the Haymarket, and as a playwright, she wrote and adapted numberless plays on marriage for the minor theatres in London. 65 For example, in 1888, she first performed The Matrimonial Agency at the Victoria Hall, Bayswater, 66 where Mrs M. French Sheldon first put on her classically inspired Pilate and Ovid’s Daughter in October 1900. Morland also acted in Austin Fryers’ Gentle Ivy at the Strand on May 1894 with Mrs Theodore Wright, 67 another of Beerbohm Tree’s actresses and frequenter of the Somerville Club. 68 Wright performed a comic recital at the club in December 1893 for a special social evening, 69 and on 22 February 1894, she was Hypatia in Mabel Collins’s response to Ogilvie: The Modern Hypatia; or a Drama of Today. 70
Collins’s The Modern Hypatia survives on one-sided and blue-inked typewritten folios in the Lord Chamberlain’s Collection (Add. MS 53542J). 71 It was first performed at the Bijou Theatre (21 Archer Street – now Westbourne Grove – in Bayswater), 72 and it loosely appropriates the myth of the well-known mathematician and philosopher of Roman Egypt to challenge one of the core themes of both the original novel and Ogilvie’s adaptation: women’s sexuality. Besides the direct allusion to Marcia Royal as a Modern Hypatia, the classical reminiscences of the play are visible in Act III, when, anachronistically, ‘Hypatia wears Greek dress for lecturing’ 73 and uses the Socratic mode to instruct Dr Vane Tylden on the emancipation of women. Marcia Royal, the Modern Hypatia ‘as they call her’ 74 is a ‘public speaker’ 75 who earns her living by giving lectures to women on the perils of marriage. Wronged by the men around her, she abandons first her husband (Lord Davanent) and then her lover (Sir George Marten) to commit herself to liberating women from their enslaved marriages through her lectures. When she travels to England and finds her long-lost daughter (Rose Davanent), she resolves to save her from a disgraceful marriage with Lewin Alexis, the fiancée she recognises as a deceitful gambler from her past. But her daughter disowns her as she is obsessed with the prevailing patriarchal ideas on marriage she has learnt from her father and her fiancée. At the end of the play, a corrupt and male-centred justice falls on the Modern Hypatia when Lord Davanent and Lewin Alexis hatch a plot to imprison her for a crime she has not committed. The avenger fallen woman reaches the end of the play unwilling to make amends and with the melodramatic promise that she will ‘consecrate’ herself to ‘the oppressed and the suffering’ women ‘victims of injustice’. 76
Collins’s Hypatia was first staged anonymously and was widely criticised for the dullness of its plot and for exposing ‘a woman more sinning than sinned against’. 77 The feminist take of the play chimes with Collins’s other works as a bestselling author of popular fiction and active campaigner for women’s suffrage. 78 The play was labelled by the critic at the Globe as the ‘latest and feeblest arraignment by the New Woman of the Old Adam’, due to the character’s public lecturing on ‘masculine turpitude and feminine wrongs’. 79 This was also the warning of the critic at the Illustrated Sporting and Dramatic News who claimed that those in the audience looking for Kingsley’s and Ogilvie’s account of the classical historical figure were to be disappointed, 80 as Hypatia was performed by Mrs Theodore Wright, an actress hardly believed to ‘pose as a beautiful young martyr’. 81 Wright was known by the London audiences for her ‘intense’ Ibsenite roles, which had been associated with women’s rights since Nora Helmer. 82 When The Modern Hypatia moved to Terry’s Theatre in the Strand on 17 June 1895, it received scathing reviews which again attacked the feminist stance and morality of the play. 83
In October 1893, Terry’s had housed the concert of the ‘Aeolian ladies’, 84 the first all-female orchestra in Great Britain, and in June, the farce Bud & Blossom by the polemical Lady Colin Campbell (Gertrude Elizabeth Blood), in which Stewart Dawson performed the role of a journalist named Bill working in a lady’s magazine under the pseudonym ‘Arachne’. 85 Coinciding in time with the concert, the farce and the performance of Hypatia at the Haymarket, another irreverent refiguration of the classical past was seen on the London stage. In January 1893 the Era announced that the ‘Beautiful Atalanta’ had finished her successful engagement with Newsome Esq. and would start her new performances at Transfield’s Circus, Paisley in Lancashire. 86 In December the same year, when Mrs Theodore Wright was performing her recital at Somerville, the ‘Beautiful Atalanta’ was exhibiting her show in Dalston, London. 87 For the rest of the century, the Atalanta show was equally demanded in the city and the provinces, as it juxtaposed two confronting models of women that were much debated at the time: the New Woman and the Variety Girl.
Contemporary reviews of the show describe its ludic overtone, which is diametrically opposed to the examples studied above: Atalanta, whose graceful figure and charming face give her a right to the title of beautiful, speeds her way on the wire first in the tunic and bloomers of the new woman. She is wise, however, in dispensing with such unnecessary impedimenta to the play of limb and presents quite an attractive picture in tights.
88
From Haringey to Holborn, Hammersmith and Croydon, from Oxford to Archer and Caxton Streets and the Strand, the ‘distinctive’ map of London’s spectacle in 1893 which has been sketched out in this section reveals a constellation of microhistories that challenge traditional geographies of the city. The ‘intertheatrical’ threads which are charted on the map result from re-orienting the focus of various disciplines to a topography of the industry which connects women, theatre and the Classics in the 1890s. Re-mapping these sites of London’s entertainment has brought to light new perspectives, new political orders of the space which, as we shall see next, aim at re-discovering new theatre histories in the longstanding history of classical receptions.
Conclusions: Reading the Map
The theatre histories recovered through an alternative map of London’s entertainment industry in 1893 allow for various readings, which I recapitulate here. These are not conclusive nor exclusive but enhance our perception of a year, which in turn serves as a sample of the whole decade. First, the classically inspired plots of the shows collected in this article are founded on random historical and mythological episodes from the Greek and Roman traditions. The choice of such classical sources might be related to the authoresses’ gendered educations in the Classics, which (if any), by the turn of the century and despite all the efforts made by women classicists at higher institutions, 93 still favoured Latin over Greek. Except for Lady Colin Campbell, who was an avid reader in the Classics, 94 I have not yet found evidence of the education in Greek and Latin of the women considered here. Therefore, besides obvious direct responses to contemporary works, such as Collins’s Hypatia, the choice of classical figures might be related to the popularised images from the Greek and Roman tradition disseminated through common dictionaries such as Lemprière’s and others, or even to the advertising industry and the cultural commodities of the time that relied on the Classics for developing the cultural imaginary of the period for wider audiences. 95 Such is the case, for example, of Héra, who was at the centre of numberless classically inspired cameos, 96 or Arachne, who was the source for countless articles on spinning and women’s labour. 97 In any case, the common links between all these classical models rely on the fact that they all represent unorthodox women related to power and/or knowledge.
The various dramatic genres of the year 1893 shown in this article – circus, short pieces, duologues, farces and even tightrope shows – enticed not only the commercial London theatres but also the ‘para-theatrical writing – not quite closet drama, not quite stage success – which characterised dramatic writing by women in the mid- and late-Victorian periods’. 98 The wide scope that this perspective allows reveals a body of work that, considering its relation to its hypotexts, falls into the category of ‘appropriations’ and ‘transplants’ of ancient images or texts through modern ‘refigurations’ with specific aesthetic, political or even pedagogical purposes. 99 As such, they provide evidence of Newey’s reasoned argument for the contribution of women to Victorian theatre beyond the major genres of the period, notably through the popularisation of the Classics.
With regard to the target audiences, there is little empirical evidence of the demographical records of the patrons at unconventional performance venues such as the Somerville Club. Therefore, from the working-class voyeurs that crowded the Palace Theatre of Varieties to the potential politically engaged female audiences at the Somerville, the heterogeneous audience considered here entails a varied knowledge of the classical hypotexts. This also serves as a counterpoint to the elite productions addressed by Hurst, which were campaigning to broaden women’s education in the London and Oxbridge circles by the 1880s. 100 It also relates to the idea of mapping and power with which I opened this article.
Viv Gardner argues that ‘the freedom to move in and around London’s West End in the nineteenth century has determined … who participates in the making of theatre’. 101 Indeed, women’s lives in late Victorian London were shaped by the places they were allowed ‘to belong to’. The persistent gendering of zones in the city – libraries, shops, museums, universities and even theatres – during the nineteenth century makes it even more important to understand how, when and where women also helped construct the cultural circumstances of London through spectacle. The pieces selected in this article prove how women’s gradual appropriation of the realm of leisure through venues, classical figures and a variety of genres – even if still predominantly male – widened the public sphere they were intending to conquer and, therefore, their political and hermeneutic experience of the city. 102
Indeed, re-orienting the gaze of the observer towards an alternative topography of the city of London unexpectedly links venues that might otherwise seem unconnected (such as the Somerville Club and the Alexandra Palace), authoresses, wo-managers and performers (Mabel Collins, Christina Dening, Lady Colin Campbell, the anonymous Atalanta) and even classical myths and figures (Hera, Hypatia and Arachne). It not only reveals women’s use of space in modern cities but also shows how the various traces of women in the city intermesh, allowing one to animate another. Finally, considering the association of women as cultural agents and the Classics as the associational pattern of this new cartography also challenges the notion of a classical repertoire and the boundaries between the popular and the legitimate, which permeate the study of classical reception in the nineteenth century.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
The research carried out for this article was funded by the projects GV/2018/A/106 and FFI2017-86417-P.
