Wendy Parkins

University of Otago, Centre for Irish and Scottish Studies, Department Member

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Formerly Professor of Victorian Literature at the University of Kent, I am now a writer and researcher based in Dunedin, New Zealand. I graduated with my second PhD, in creative writing, from the University of Otago, 2024.
In 2019, my memoir Every Morning, So Far, I'm Alive was published by Otago University Press.
In 2024, my first novel, An Idle Woman (based on the life of Frances Elliot, the Victorian travel writer) was published by Legend Press, UK, and re-published as The Defiance of Frances Dickinson by Affirm Press, Melbourne.
I am working on a new novel, Hope Street, and I continue with academic research in Victorian Literature topics including Charles Dickens, Edward Carpenter, sensation fiction, Victorian sustainability and environmentalism in Britain and New Zealand.
Address: @wendmyway.bsky.social
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Books by Wendy Parkins

Jane Morris: The Burden of History

William Morris and the Art of Everyday Life

Mobility and Modernity in Women's Novels, 1850s-1930s

Slow Living

Papers by Wendy Parkins

Moving Dangerously

Mobility and Modernity in Women’s Novels, 1850s–1930s, 2009

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Protesting like a Girl

Feminist Theory, Apr 1, 2000

This article examines feminist agency in the light of Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological account of... more This article examines feminist agency in the light of Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological account of the body subject. Stressing the importance of embodiment to feminist agency (without reifying an essential female body), I argue that bodies inhabit specific social, historical and discursive contexts which shape our corporeal experience and our opportunities for political contestation. Beginning with the assertion that we cannot think of agency without the body, I examine a historical instance of feminist agency in which women’s bodies were central to the articulation of political dissent, namely the British suffragette movement. In particular, I focus on the suffragette career of Mary Leigh and argue that it represents a feminist agency derived from corporeal performance. Through daring acts of protest which drew attention to the comportment and capacities of their bodies, suffragettes like Leigh contested the constitution of the political domain and the nature of citizenship.

Fashioning the body politic : dress, gender, citizenship

Berg eBooks, 2002

... Fashioning the Body Politic: Dress, Gender, Citizenship. Auteur(s) : PARKINS Wendy Date de pa... more

Victorian Sustainability in Literature and Culture

At Home in Tuscany: Slow Living and the Cosmopolitan Subject

Home Cultures, Nov 1, 2004

This article will examine how the recent proliferation of “at home in Tuscany” literature represe... more This article will examine how the recent proliferation of “at home in Tuscany” literature represents a desire to live differently through both a change of location and a change in temporality. Slow living is offered as the key to an enriched life and is closely linked to notions of authenticity bound up with everyday practices of domesticity, especially those connected with food. In looking closely at some examples of this Tuscan farmhouse literature and considering what constitutes la vita lenta, I will analyze two broad areas of concern: first, how the values and practices of slow living constitute a particular kind of “slow” subject, characterized by cosmopolitanism but located in domesticity; secondly, whether the celebration of slow living is a nostalgic and reactionary evasion of the “real world,” or whether it represents an opportunity to think ethically and creatively about how we live.

19: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century 26: Victorian Ecology

Open Library of Humanities, Jul 6, 2018

The nineteenth century witnessed a transformation in how the relationship between the human and t... more The nineteenth century witnessed a transformation in how the relationship between the human and the non-human world was understood. In the sciences, a more contextual approach to studying the relationship between animals and plants saw the biologist Ernst Haeckel coin the term ‘ecology’ to refer to ‘the relationship of the organism to the surrounding exterior world’. Outside of the sciences, the social and environmental consequences of industrialization and urbanization were informing a growing cultural understanding of the dynamic relationship between human societies and the non-human world upon whose resources they relied. This issue of 19 focuses on the development of ecological ideas in Victorian culture and literature. Building on the recent turn to ecocritical methodologies within Victorian studies, it examines the Victorian roots of the Anthropocene, the proposed epoch in which human actions are seen to have shaped ecological and geological systems at a planetary level, and suggests the ways in which Victorian culture can help us both historicize and theorize our present planetary condition. Comprised of five scholarly articles and an interview with Claire Colebrook, a literary theorist who has turned to the philosophical implications of the Anthropocene in recent years, this issue brings to light the multifaceted and heterogeneous understanding of ecology in the Victorian period. It covers topics as diverse as climate change, animal welfare, queer ecology, labour conditions, and imperial expansion, and traces ecological ideas in canonical figures, such as John Ruskin and Thomas Hardy, and lesser studied writers, such as Edward Carpenter and Ada Cambridge, as well as in the broader material culture of autobiography, periodical fiction, and paintings

Jane Morris

This is a scholarly monograph devoted to Jane Morris, an icon of Victorian art whose face continu... more This is a scholarly monograph devoted to Jane Morris, an icon of Victorian art whose face continues to grace a range of Pre-Raphaelite merchandise. Described by Henry James as a 'dark, silent, medieval woman', Jane Burden Morris has tended to remain a rather one-dimensional figure in subsequent accounts. This book, however, challenges the stereotype of Jane Morris as silent model, reclusive invalid, and unfaithful wife. Drawing on extensive archival research as well as the biographical and literary tradition surrounding William Morris and Dante Gabriel Rossetti, the book argues that Jane Morris is a figure who complicates current understandings of Victorian female subjectivity because she does not fit neatly into Victorian categories of feminine identity. She was a working-class woman who married into middle-class affluence, an artist's model who became an accomplished embroiderer and designer, and an apparently reclusive, silent invalid who was the lover of Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Wilfred Scawen Blunt. Jane Morris particularly focuses on textual representations - in letters, diaries, memoirs and novels - from the Victorian period onwards, in order to investigate the cultural transmission and resilience of the stereotype of Jane Morris. Drawing on recent reconceptualisations of gender, auto/biography, and afterlives, this book urges readers to think differently - about an extraordinary woman and about life-writing in the Victorian period. It is the first scholarly study of Jane Morris, which seeks to challenge the stereotype surrounding her as melancholy invalid and Pre-Raphaelite femme fatale. It is an innovative case study of the role of class, gender and sexuality in the formation of Victorian feminine subjectivity. It is a contribution to emerging field of new biography and Victorian afterlives through the inclusion and examination of a wide variety of texts which construct the self. It is an original exploration of feminine creative agency that challenges conventional understandings of masculine artistic autonomy in the Victorian period.

Slow Food Movement

Encyclopedia of Consumer Culture

Jane Morris

Edinburgh University Press eBooks, Apr 15, 2013

Taking liberty's: Suffragettes and the public sphere: 1905-1914

This thesis examines women's bodies in public spaces, as represented in texts produced by and... more This thesis examines women's bodies in public spaces, as represented in texts produced by and about British suffragettes active in the militant campaign for women's enfranchisement (1905- 14). The texts under discussion here include suffragette fiction, autobiography, history and journalism. This thesis argues that these suffragette representations, in which the specificities of women's bodies are central, constitute not only a contestation of the political domain but a reconfiguration of the public sphere. Drawing on the work of Jurgen Habermas and recent feminist critiques of liberal political theory, it is further argued that the emphasis on bodily performance in suffragette tactics implicitly critiqued the grounding assumptions of the modern liberal state such as the privileging of disembodied reason. This thesis also proposes that, concomitant with this refiguring of the political domain, the performative tactics of the suffragette campaign constructed a distinctive...

Destinations of the Modern Woman

Mobility and Modernity in Women’s Novels, 1850s–1930s, 2009

In the preceding chapters, I have considered how the unevenness of women’s experience of modernit... more In the preceding chapters, I have considered how the unevenness of women’s experience of modernity were represented through narratives of mobility in novels in a range of modes, from pastoral to parody, realist to modernist. Here, I want to depart from an exclusive focus on the novel form for two main reasons. Firstly, while my methodology has privileged textual analysis over biographical explanations in the novels I have discussed, it is not without significance that the women writers featured in this study were themselves modern mobile subjects, with first-hand experience of the nonsynchronicities of modernity. Rather than providing historical accounts of the mobility of each author I have featured, however, I will draw on selective examples of mobile authors in order to further contextualise my discussion of women’s modernity3 Secondly, by examining instances of women’s mobility in non-fictional modes, I hope to signal further directions in which the study of women’s modernity could proceed. The inclusion of May Sinclair’s A Journal of Impressions in Belgium, for instance, allows me to address women’s mobility in relation to one of the defining experiences of twentieth-century modernity, namely the First World War. As a cataclysmic event that, on the one hand, mobilised and dislocated millions around the world and, on the other, relied on women’s (discursive and physical) location on the ‘home front’, World War I warrants consideration in the context of examining the place and agency of women in modernity.

Modernity, Mobility and Women’s Agency

Mobility and Modernity in Women’s Novels, 1850s–1930s, 2009

During parliamentary debate over John Stuart Mill’s proposal to extend the vote to unmarried wome... more During parliamentary debate over John Stuart Mill’s proposal to extend the vote to unmarried women in 1867, John Burgess Karslake, the member for Colchester, defended his opposition to the bill by referring to the then legal status of wives: it would be inconsistent to enfranchise women when the property and mobility of wives were legally deemed to be under the control of their husbands. In this debate — and much to Mill’s evident frustration — the distinction between married and unmarried women seemed impossible to maintain. To enfranchise women of any status was seen as a precursor to enfranchising married women which opponents viewed with alarm, while it was feared that single women would be disinclined to marry if they had to relinquish the vote in doing so. The significance of Karslake’s objection lies not only in his insistence that women collectively were outside the political domain, but also in his association of women’s immobility with patriarchal control: a woman who could control her own property or vote was a woman who would — inevitably? — ‘gad about’, leave the confinement of the domestic sphere and elude the authority of her husband. Freedom of movement was implicitly associated with property rights and political entitlements. A woman free to ‘gad about’ would possibly be inclined to take other liberties as well, and this implication was probably not lost on Karslake’s audience, given the tendency of parliamentary debates concerning women’s rights to raise the spectre of an unrestrained female sexuality.