Être et paraître dans Miss Brown De Vernon Lee

In her first novel Miss Brown (1884), Vernon Lee painted a critical picture of the Pre-Raphaelite Movement and the Aesthetic circle. She critiqued the ideological underpinnings of the Aesthetic movement, analyzing in particular how the supposedly disinterested artistic creed of art for art’s sake often consisted in intellectualizing and repressing reality by objectifying the body in all its forms. Through the description of the career of Anne Brown, this anti-Bildungsroman particularly exposed the social, political, intellectual and sexual exploitation of female models and muses