Guinevere, by Eleanor Fortescue Brickdale, ROI, RWS 1872-1945

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Guinevere

Eleanor Fortescue Brickdale, ROI, RWS, 1872-1945

Water-colour illustration / colour plate

1918

Source: Brickdale 132

Lines printed with the title: "Her memory, from old habit of mind / Went slipping back upon the golden days / In which she saw him first, when Launcelot came" (from Tennyson's Guinevere). Anthony Harrison talks of the "extraordinarily wide dissemination" of Tennyson's Idylls of the King (605), and it enjoyed tremendous success throughout the period, despite the poet's traditionalist stance in Guinevere. William Morris's "The Defence of Guenevere" put a different complexion on her adultery. Harrison notes that it was too radical for most readers when first published (1858), but became influential later. Brickdale's representation of her, as beautiful and at one with surrounding nature, seems to confirm a shift in sympathies.

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Related Material

Image download, text and formatting by Jacqueline Banerjee. [You may use this image without prior permission for any scholarly or educational purpose as long as you (1) credit the Internet Archive and (2) link your document to this URL in a web document or cite the Victorian Web in a print one.]

Bibliography

Brickdale, Eleanor Fortescue. Eleanor Fortescue Brickdale's Golden Book of Famous Women. London, New York and Toronto: Hodder & Stoughton, 1919. Internet Archive. Contributed by the University of California Libraries. Web. 7 October 2021.

Harrison. Anthony H. "Mid-to-Late Victorian Medievalist Poetry." The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Medievalism. Ed. Joanna Parker and Corrina Wagner. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020.

Created 7 October 2021