British Women Writers and the Reception of Ancient Egypt, 1840-1910

Molly Youngkin is Professor of English at Loyola Marymount University, Los Angeles, USA. Her previous publications include Feminist Realism at the Fin de Siècle: The Influence of the Late-Victorian Woman's Press on the Development of the Novel (2007) and an annotated edition of Sarah Grand's 1888 novel Ideala (2008).

“British Women Writers and the Reception of Ancient Egypt offers a new perspective on a set of authors and texts which will help to open up the study of Victorian receptions of ancient Egypt, as well as being of interest to scholars and students of nineteenth-century literature, postcolonialisms, and gender studies.” (Laura Eastlake, English Literature in Transition, Vol. 60 (4), 2017)

• Introduction 1. Bound by an English Eye: Ancient Cultures, Imperialist Contexts, and Literary Representations of Egyptian Women2. Acting as "the right hand . . . of God": Christianized Egyptian Women and Religious Devotion as Emancipation in Florence Nightingale's Fictionalized Treatises3. "[T]o give new elements . . . as vivid as . . . long familiar types": Heroic Jewish Men, Dangerous Egyptian Women, and Equivocal Emancipation in George Eliot's Novels4. "[W]e had never chosen a Byzantine subject . . . or one from Alexandria": Emancipation through Desire and the Eastern Limits of Beauty in Michael Field's Verse Dramas 5. The "sweetness of the serpent of old Nile": Revisionist Cleopatra and Spiritual Union as Emancipation in Elinor Glyn's Crosscultural Romances6. "My ancestor, my sister": Ancient Heritage Imagery and Modern Egyptian Women WritersAfterword