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ANDRES, SOPHIA. The Pre-Raphaelite Art of the Victorian Novel: Narrative Challenges to Visual Gendered Boundaries. Columbus: The Ohio State University Press, 2005. 208 pp. $29.95.
The Victorian period, and particularly the Pre-Raphaelite movement, invites a rich, interdisciplinary exploration of its artistic creations. Sophia Andres's The Pre- Raphaelite Art of the Victorian Novel responds insightfully to that invitation, providing a profoundly enlightening study of the way four novels by Elizabeth Gaskell, Wilkie Collins, George Eliot, and Thomas Hardy "reconfigur[e]" (xv) specific Pre-Raphaelite paintings within their narratives. Andres's tandem aim is to examine gender issues suggested by the conscious convergence of the verbal and the visual in these novels. Convincingly using contemporary reviews, the novelists' journals, correspondences, and the texts themselves, she asserts that the novelists engage their Victorian readers in debates over issues through these reconfigurations of Pre-Raphaelite art.
Andres begins by establishing what "affinities" (4) Victorian novelists share with the Pre-Raphaelites, and demonstrating ways that the Pre-Raphaelites challenged the period's conventional perceptions. Focusing mainly on John Everett Millais, William Holman Hunt, Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Edward Burne-Jones, Andres situates the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood as "revolutionaries" (4-5). Through close examination of selected paintings, Andres extracts significant connections between the Pre-Raphaelites and the...