Between the Aesthete and the Shopworker: Mind and Labour In Vernon Lee and Amy Levy

March-Russell shows that work and the idea of work figure as key concepts in Miss Brown (1884) by Vernon Lee (Violet Paget) and The Romance of a Shop (1888) by Amy Levy. Lee’s satire on Aestheticism about domestic servant Anne Brown and Levy’s novel about the Lorimer sisters who in a state of genteel poverty try to make a living through running a photography shop re-engender ideas John Ruskin expressed in his essay ‘Work’ (1866) about brain work and hand work. March-Russell argues that mental and physical labour are intertwined in these novels which both debate the moral, intellectual, and social efficacies of work, especially as they overlap with the proscribed gender definitions and limited physical movement of late Victorian women. At the same time they capture the contradictory anxieties and hopes of female authors during the first half of the 1880s.