Educating Ida: Gilbert and Sullivan Among the New Women

Lybeck, Eleanor ORCID: 0000-0002-4987-699X (2023) Educating Ida: Gilbert and Sullivan Among the New Women. LITERATURE & HISTORY-THIRD SERIES, 32 (1). pp. 25-45.

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Official URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/03061973231175842

Abstract

<jats:p> Gilbert and Sullivan's eighth Savoy opera Princess Ida (1884) is best understood against the backdrop of women's higher education and emancipation in nineteenth-century Britain. Careful work has been done in tracing correspondences between the opera and its source texts, but Ida is not only a descendant of literary figures. She is the peer of the pioneering women of Girton College, Cambridge whose biographies attest to the challenges faced by women in pursuit of an education at the end of the nineteenth century. This association allows Ida and her students to be positioned as precursors of that fin-de-siècle phenomenon, the New Woman. Often dismissed as an uncomfortable relic of Victorian male chauvinism, the political and ideological complexity behind Princess Ida is recognised here as the opera is identified as one moment in continuous literary, cultural and social history. </jats:p>

Item Type:	Article
Uncontrolled Keywords:	Higher education, women, feminism, nineteenth-century culture, opera
Divisions:	Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences > School of Histories, Languages and Cultures
Depositing User:	Symplectic Admin
Date Deposited:	20 Jan 2023 08:20
Last Modified:	07 Sep 2023 06:03
DOI:	10.1177/03061973231175842
Related URLs:	Author Publisher
URI:	https://livrepository.liverpool.ac.uk/id/eprint/3167155