- Title
- Frederic Leighton's 'Narcissus' Hall: sensation and interior description in nineteenth-century London
- Creator
- Taylor, Mark
- Relation
- Performance, Fashion and the Modern Interior: From the Victorians to Today p. 31-43
- Relation
- http://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/performance-fashion-and-the-modern-interior-9781847887818/
- Publisher
- Berg
- Resource Type
- book chapter
- Date
- 2011
- Description
- In recent years, references to Mary Eliza Haweis's (1848-1898) collection of twelve essays titled Beautiful Houses (1882) have appeared in several publications concerned with Victorian art, architecture and interiors. Many of these citations focus on the style of writing, often dismissing her interior descriptions because they use emotive, expressive and sensory language to engage the audience. They also tend to discount her descriptions in favour of more objective and rational period accounts or retrospective critical writing. The method by which this occurs is to foreground or condition any citations with prejudicial comments about her amateur or popular status. Generally couched in the negative, this prejudice is in some sense criticism of her voice as an amateur failing to meet the demands of true scholarship. This chapter discusses one passage from the description of Frederic Leighton's house as a form of synaesthetic writing intimately bound to the author's personality. To construct an analysis of this passage, and the publication in general, I draw upon book reviews and notices of articles to illustrate period reception. I then review contemporary literature that engages with this publication before discussing synaesthesia as a neuroscientific disorder and as a form of writing. I trace Haweis's correspondence with Sir Francis Galton, who used her as a subject in his pioneering research on synaesthesia and particularly noted that some people experience sensations in multiple modalities in response to stimulation of one modality. Lastly, I indicate how the writing and book challenge conventional prose and layout in a manner that appeals to sensations-a methodology taken up by several contemporary feminist authors.
- Subject
- Mary Eliza Haweis; synaesthesia; interiors
- Identifier
- http://hdl.handle.net/1959.13/1054943
- Identifier
- uon:15810
- Identifier
- ISBN:9781847887818
- Language
- eng
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