Book Description

This year marks the bicentennial of the English writer, translator, critic and amateur artist Elizabeth Rigby, Lady Eastlake (1809–93). The Letters of Elizabeth Rigby, Lady Eastlake brings together a comprehensive collection of her surviving correspondence and reveals significant new material about this extraordinary Victorian figure. Rigby wrote on a variety of subjects, most notably reviews of works and authors such as Jane Eyre, Vanity Fair, Ruskin, Coleridge, and Madame de Staël, as well as art-related criticism, including one of the earliest critical texts on photography. Her lively correspondence here shows how this well-connected woman played such an important role in the Victorian art world.