Between The Spheres: Breaking The Boundary Between Private And Public Spheres In Wilkie Collins’s The Woman In White And William Holman Hunt’s The Lady Of Shalott, Alison Westwood

The nineteenth-century notion of a public sphere for male-authored content and a private sphere for female-authored content made the female diary an apt literary device to incorporate female narration into fiction. The hypothetical effects of breaching the boundary between these two spheres precipitates a move from a state of order to a state of chaos, through the medium of text in Wilkie Collins's The Woman in White1and through painting in William Holman Hunt's The Lady of Shalott2.