CLASSICISTS

CLASSICISTS

Abstract

273 CLASSICISTS Victorian Women Writers and the Classics: The Feminine of Homer. By ISOBEL HURST. Oxford University Press, 2006; £45. This is a well-judged and richly informed book, sometimes reminding one of things once known and making connections between them, perhaps unnoticed before. It notes and uses the existing scholarship very thoroughly. One prime concern is to show that ‘the extent to which women writers actually studied classical texts, and made use of them in their writing, has been seriously underestimated’. This study was not an exclusively male prerogative, she writes. Isobel Hurst has a good ear for an apt, sometimes comical, quotation. Dr Johnson on his friend Elizabeth Carter: ‘She could make a pudding as well as translate Epictetus’. Jane Austen on Lady Jane Grey on her way to execution: ‘She wrote a Sentence in Latin and another in Greek on seeing the dead body of her Husband accidentally passing that way’ (the history may not be up to scratch). Swinburne on his Lesbia Brandon: ‘she can do classics fit for a sixth-form’. Even Lucy Snowe in Charlotte Bronte’s Villette is ¨ funny about M. Paul’s conviction that, secretly, she can read Latin and Greek. Isobel Hurst’s