Charles Kingsley's use of Saint Catherine of Egypt

Hugh Witemeyer, Professor of English, University of New Mexico

Note 61 to Chapter 6 of the author's George Eliot and the Visual Arts, which Yale University Press published in a 1979. It has been included in the Victorian web with the kind permission of the author, who of course retains copyright.

In Yeast: A Problem (London: John W. Parker, 1851), p. 17, Charles Kingsley describes Argemone Lavington in terms of the same picture: "With her perfect masque, and queenly figure, and earnest upward gaze, she might have been the very model whom which Raphael conceived his glorious St. Catherine -- the ideal of the highest womanly genius, softened into self-forgetfulness by girlish devotion." This characterization is discussed by John R. Reed, Victorian Conventions, p. 38.

Last modified 20 September 2000