Victorian legacies of beauty: Feminine beauty ideals in the fiction of Lady Blessington, Charlotte Bronte, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, and George Eliot

Images of beautiful women abounded in Victorian England. From novel heroines to gift book engravings or magazine fashion plates, female beauty ideals were mass produced and consumed. Rather than being removed from history or politics, such ideals of beauty embodied, questioned, and extended cultural ideologies that exercised significant power during the Victorian period. The fiction of four Victorian female authors, Lady Blessington, Charlotte Bronte, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, and George Eliot, explicitly examines, critiques, and rewrites popular Victorian beauty ideals. In writing about beautiful and not-so-beautiful women, these authors participated in a cultural dialectic concerning how ideal femininity should be defined.;Marguerite Blessington, an aristocratic hostess and fashionable editor of Victorian gift books, embodied aristocratic beauty ideals of the 1830s. From 1833 to 1849, she edited and contributed to Heath's Book of Beauty, a popular Victorian annual that appealed to socially ambitious middle-class readers through a combination of engravings of aristocratic ladies and stories about beautiful women. Charlotte Bronte was greatly influenced by the annuals in her teenage years, yet she rejected the aristocratic beauty ideal celebrated by annuals through her creation of "plain" heroines in her mature fiction. Mary Elizabeth Braddon dramatically parodied conventional beauty ideals in her best-selling novel, Lady Audley's Secret, by portraying a beautiful, doll-like heroine who commits treacherous crimes. Braddon's novel disrupted the assumptions of physiognomists and other Victorian social scientists that female beauty indicated moral soundness and biological health. By the time George Eliot began Daniel Deronda in 1876 with the question, "Was she beautiful or not beautiful?" the relationship between female beauty and character was a well established problem. Eliot revised scientific theories of sexual selection through her portrayal of a heroine who wants to "choose" rather than to be "chosen.".