http://worldcat.org/entity/work/id/477591964

Picture miladies the illustrating of George MacDonald's fairy-tale women by Arthur Hughes

Since only a handful of articles address briefly the illustrations that Arthur Hughes (1832-1915) did for the fairy tales of George MacDonald (1824-1905), yet all the critics agree that the best work of MacDonald remains his fairy tales and the best medium for Hughes remains his woodcut engravings for those fairy tales, "Picture Miladies: the Illustrating of George MacDonald's Fairy-tale Women by Arthur Hughes" analyzes how Hughes's pictures provide an iconographic interpretation of MacDonald's fairy-tale women. Without exception, Hughes differs in his pictorial details from MacDonald's descriptions in the stories to create a new synthesis of meaning: when MacDonald develops characters modelled after the intellectual, independent New Woman, Hughes inoculates the possible subversiveness of such a portrait with his own chivalrous rhetoric; consequently, MacDonald and Hughes succeed together in creating a holy-sexy-independent fairy-tale heroine. Chapter One establishes the context for this study by describing MacDonald's and Hughes's backgrounds, specifically outlining MacDonald's relationship with the suffragists and Hughes's relationship with the Pre-Raphaelites. Chapter Two, on the early fairy tale "The Day Boy and the Night Girl," explains how MacDonald creates an intellectually acute heroine who teaches herself to read, while Hughes depicts her iconographically as insipid. Chapter Three, discussing At the Back of the North Wind, refutes the recent charge that MacDonald was a pedophile; instead, the chapter builds a case for MacDonald's iconoclastic view of women's sexuality. It presents MacDonald's characterization of North Wind as a holy paragon of power, while showing Hughes's characterization of her as morally weak. Chapter Four, on The Princess and the Goblin, explains how MacDonald describes the great-great-grandmother as attractive, and Hughes embellishes that description as sexily beautiful. To conclude, Chapter Five traces how the individual legacies of each man emphasize strains quite different from those of their mutual legacy seen in children's literature today.

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