Germaine de Stael, George Sand and the Victorian Woman Artist

By examining literary portraits of the woman as artist, Linda M. Lewis traces the matrilineal inheritance of four Victorian novelists and poets: George Eliot, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Geraldine Jewsbury and Mrs Humphrey Ward. She argues that while the male Romantic artist saw himself as a god and hero, the women of genius lacked a guiding myth until Germaine de Stael and George Sand created one. The protagonists of Staels "Corinne" and Sand's "Consuelo" combine attributes of the goddess Athena, the Virgin Mary, Virgil's Sibyl and Dante's Beatrice.