“Mariana in the Moated Grange” by John Everett Millais (1851)
This is an in person (open to the public) event that will be live streamed at Doheny Library, with a reception and exhibition of Ruskin Historical Documents in the Feuchtwanger Room (4pm).
Dinah Birch, CBE, is an English literary critic. Emeritus Professor of English Literature at Liverpool University, she has edited two books on Ruskin, Ruskin and Gender (2002) and John Ruskin: Selected Writings (2004). Birch served as the general editor of the 2012 edition of the Oxford Companion to English Literature (2012).
Ruskin’s writing on women was complex, and sometimes contradictory. Something similar may be said of his far-reaching influence, both in his lifetime and since. Women were a major presence in his life, and his closest associates and most devoted followers were female. His contemporaries did not see him as a wholly masculine figure, though he claimed patriarchal authority in his roles as cultural critic or as the Master of the Guild of St George. In the decades immediately succeeding his death, his legacy often inspired women’s growing ambitions to play an active part in public life, for Ruskin had always insisted that they had a right and a responsibility to work – noting, for instance, of Millais’s painting of Tennyson’s Mariana (1851) that if he had painted ‘Mariana at work in an unmoated grange, instead of idle in a moated one, it had been more to the point – whether of art or of life’. But he defined women’s obligations in language that was offensive to later twentieth-century feminists, and this damaged his reputation. Recent interpretations of Ruskin’s continuing significance have explored the tensions within his gendered identity. This lecture will reflect on the evolution of these debates, arguing that Ruskin’s rich and challenging thought, with its piercing critique of unregulated capitalism and environmental destruction, continues to have much to offer both men and women.