Kirby-Jane Hallum
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BA Hons, MA (Otago)
PhD (Auckland)
My research interests lie in the long 19th century in Britain and New Zealand, with particular focus on women’s and popular literature. My monograph, "Aestheticism and the Marriage Market in Victorian Popular Fiction: The Art of Female Beauty", was published by Pickering & Chatto in early 2015.
I am also working on two other projects: a study of Britain’s influence on New Zealand New Woman writing, and relatedly, the impact of the aesthetic movement in colonial New Zealand homes.
Authors and artists whose work I am interested in include:
Marie Corelli, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Wilkie Collins, Rhoda Broughton, George Meredith, Ouida, George du Maurier, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, William Morris and Edward Burne-Jones
Address: University of Auckland
BA Hons, MA (Otago)
PhD (Auckland)
My research interests lie in the long 19th century in Britain and New Zealand, with particular focus on women’s and popular literature. My monograph, "Aestheticism and the Marriage Market in Victorian Popular Fiction: The Art of Female Beauty", was published by Pickering & Chatto in early 2015.
I am also working on two other projects: a study of Britain’s influence on New Zealand New Woman writing, and relatedly, the impact of the aesthetic movement in colonial New Zealand homes.
Authors and artists whose work I am interested in include:
Marie Corelli, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Wilkie Collins, Rhoda Broughton, George Meredith, Ouida, George du Maurier, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, William Morris and Edward Burne-Jones
Address: University of Auckland
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Books by Kirby-Jane Hallum
Papers by Kirby-Jane Hallum
fascination with the natural world in nineteenth-century fiction is well established, within this lively field of enquiry, insufficient attention has been given to Victorian writers’ productive engagement with floriography, a system of reference that accompanied the nineteenth century’s burgeoning interest in botany and classification. Perhaps its status as a popular culture phenomenon is to blame for it being neglected in literary analysis, but in the context of women sensation writers who were trying to highlight social issues, while still conforming to moral standards, the language of flowers provides a strategic yet restrained way to write about female desire.
Conference Papers by Kirby-Jane Hallum
This paper will consider New Zealand women’s visibility within the nexus of changing standards for female beauty over the second half of the 19th century, focusing in particular on the tension between the pervasive influence of British and American beauty products and the emergent national identity of the healthy, robust and naturally beautiful New Zealand woman who began to inhabit the pages of local newspapers.
“Nature has not made all women beautiful, but if it has endowed her with good taste and habits of cleanliness the chances are she will be a greater success in social and domestic circles than if she depended upon mere physical beauty alone” observed Louisa Alice Baker in the Ladies Pages of the Otago Witness in 1889. Baker’s weekly column was dedicated to topics of the day such as personal beautification and home decoration and contributed to public debates as to what constituted female beauty in the colony.
In this paper I consider nostalgia via the artistic reproduction of Trilby’s feet. In the opening chapter Little Billee takes out a compass and scratches out an outline of ‘Trilby’s left foot.’ He draws her foot from memory, but – ‘slight as it was, this little piece of impromptu etching, in its sense of beauty, in its quick seizing of a peculiar individuality, its subtle rendering of a strongly received impression, was already the work of a master . . .’ The little masterpiece, a metonymic reminder of Trilby herself, carries even more currency when the three artists return to Paris some years later and visit this relic from their past. By now the chalk sketch, effectively a memoralisation in situ, is framed and covered by glass but still looks ‘as if it had been done only yesterday!’ Examining nostalgia in this context as a desire to preserve material remains from earlier in the century also highlights wider fin-de-siècle anxieties about being between the two cultural eras of the Victorian and the modern.
According to Talia Schaffer and Kathy Alexis Psomiades, “the reputations of many of the female aesthetes deteriorated during the modernist era” (Women and British Aestheticism p. 13). Renowned just as much for their eccentric lifestyles as for their highly popular fiction, Ouida and Corelli’s aesthetic lives have invited a reasonable amount of critical attention over the last century that positions both women as vivacious, outspoken and socially rebellious. Yet only in the last few decades have scholars really begun to interrogate their fiction.
My main area of inquiry will be to compare male and female writers and how they use aestheticism to underpin their representation of the Victorian marriage market. As far the relationship between gender and genre goes, however, the contrast between these authors is even richer when it comes to the way their bestselling novels have been received beyond the nineteenth century. The lasting popularity (or not) of texts by Ouida, Corelli, Wilde and du Maurier will be surveyed in order to gauge why some literature that was in high circulation during the last third of the nineteenth century was condescendingly dismissed in the century that followed.
In Cometh Up as a Flower (1867) Rhoda Broughton’s heroine is a Pre-Raphaelite beauty whose striking self-representation embodies a natural aesthetic. George Meredith’s The Egoist (1879) extends Broughton’s imbrication of nature with natural beauty, re-energising it as a concept that is in conversation with Darwinian theories of natural selection. In this paper I draw on post-romantic network of natural imagery to reveal how female beauty is validated in each novel. Relying on a contemporary reader’s knowledge of floriography, or the language of flowers, allows Broughton and Meredith to communicate meaning and sentiment that revivifies the entrenched historical association between women and nature.
""
Book Reviews by Kirby-Jane Hallum
fascination with the natural world in nineteenth-century fiction is well established, within this lively field of enquiry, insufficient attention has been given to Victorian writers’ productive engagement with floriography, a system of reference that accompanied the nineteenth century’s burgeoning interest in botany and classification. Perhaps its status as a popular culture phenomenon is to blame for it being neglected in literary analysis, but in the context of women sensation writers who were trying to highlight social issues, while still conforming to moral standards, the language of flowers provides a strategic yet restrained way to write about female desire.
This paper will consider New Zealand women’s visibility within the nexus of changing standards for female beauty over the second half of the 19th century, focusing in particular on the tension between the pervasive influence of British and American beauty products and the emergent national identity of the healthy, robust and naturally beautiful New Zealand woman who began to inhabit the pages of local newspapers.
“Nature has not made all women beautiful, but if it has endowed her with good taste and habits of cleanliness the chances are she will be a greater success in social and domestic circles than if she depended upon mere physical beauty alone” observed Louisa Alice Baker in the Ladies Pages of the Otago Witness in 1889. Baker’s weekly column was dedicated to topics of the day such as personal beautification and home decoration and contributed to public debates as to what constituted female beauty in the colony.
In this paper I consider nostalgia via the artistic reproduction of Trilby’s feet. In the opening chapter Little Billee takes out a compass and scratches out an outline of ‘Trilby’s left foot.’ He draws her foot from memory, but – ‘slight as it was, this little piece of impromptu etching, in its sense of beauty, in its quick seizing of a peculiar individuality, its subtle rendering of a strongly received impression, was already the work of a master . . .’ The little masterpiece, a metonymic reminder of Trilby herself, carries even more currency when the three artists return to Paris some years later and visit this relic from their past. By now the chalk sketch, effectively a memoralisation in situ, is framed and covered by glass but still looks ‘as if it had been done only yesterday!’ Examining nostalgia in this context as a desire to preserve material remains from earlier in the century also highlights wider fin-de-siècle anxieties about being between the two cultural eras of the Victorian and the modern.
According to Talia Schaffer and Kathy Alexis Psomiades, “the reputations of many of the female aesthetes deteriorated during the modernist era” (Women and British Aestheticism p. 13). Renowned just as much for their eccentric lifestyles as for their highly popular fiction, Ouida and Corelli’s aesthetic lives have invited a reasonable amount of critical attention over the last century that positions both women as vivacious, outspoken and socially rebellious. Yet only in the last few decades have scholars really begun to interrogate their fiction.
My main area of inquiry will be to compare male and female writers and how they use aestheticism to underpin their representation of the Victorian marriage market. As far the relationship between gender and genre goes, however, the contrast between these authors is even richer when it comes to the way their bestselling novels have been received beyond the nineteenth century. The lasting popularity (or not) of texts by Ouida, Corelli, Wilde and du Maurier will be surveyed in order to gauge why some literature that was in high circulation during the last third of the nineteenth century was condescendingly dismissed in the century that followed.
In Cometh Up as a Flower (1867) Rhoda Broughton’s heroine is a Pre-Raphaelite beauty whose striking self-representation embodies a natural aesthetic. George Meredith’s The Egoist (1879) extends Broughton’s imbrication of nature with natural beauty, re-energising it as a concept that is in conversation with Darwinian theories of natural selection. In this paper I draw on post-romantic network of natural imagery to reveal how female beauty is validated in each novel. Relying on a contemporary reader’s knowledge of floriography, or the language of flowers, allows Broughton and Meredith to communicate meaning and sentiment that revivifies the entrenched historical association between women and nature.
""