My research focuses on a corpus of texts by British women writers concerning Italy and the Mediterranean between the nineteenth and the twentieth century with the aim of investigating the role that both the concept of the 'South' and the reception of Latin and Greek classics played in the formation of a British cultural and literary identity. The study will proceed chronologically, by examining the works of 'Michael Field', pseudonym of fin de siècle poets and classicists Katharine Bradley (1846-1914) and Edith Cooper (1862-1913), authors of the Sapphic collection of poems Long Ago. As a trait d'union between late Victorian Hellenism and Modernism, I will analyse the life and work of Jane Ellen Harrison (1850-1928), the first internationally renowned academic classicist, whose ground-breaking studies on ancient Greece influenced major Modernist writers. The study will then focus on some lesser-known texts by Virginia Woolf, namely her letters and personal diaries with her travel notes from the years 1908-09, 1927 and 1933-1935, concerning Italy, Sicily and the Mediterranean. Finally, the project will include the case-study of writer and entrepreneur Daphne Phelps (1911-2005), who expatriated in the early 1950s to Taormina, where she welcomed an international community of intellectuals. Phelps published her memoir in 1999 with the title A House in Sicily (Una casa in Sicilia, 2005).
By adopting the methodology of Women's Studies, Gender and Cultural Studies, Classical Reception Studies and Mediterranean Studies, I will analyse the historical context and the material conditions in which women, excluded from Oxford and Cambridge, had access to the classics; concomitantly, I will also consider women’s absence, or minority position, in the Grand Tour tradition.