Creative Negativity

Focusing on the early Modern and Victorian periods, the author finds covert revolutionaries in four female practitioners of a strategy she calls creative negativity. She opens up for inspection the lives and creative endeavors of poet-photographer Julia Margaret Cameron (1815-1879), novelist-essayist Anne Thackeray Ritchie (1837-1919), activist-spiritual leader Annie Besant (1847-1933), and actress-writer Elizabeth Robins (1862-1952). Creative negativity grows out of either philosophical or emotional negativity; it evokes a focal point, often a place; it combines reality and illusion; it suggests a shift in magnitude, a sense of multifariousness or zooming out; it includes an altered sense of time by reaching backward, moving outside temporality, or attenuating time; and it evokes self-referentiality, an aesthetic or formal invocation in a work of art, a sense of self-consciousness in social contexts.