Taming the Goddess: Managing male fear and desire in late Victorian England: Astarte Syriaca (1877) by Dante Gabriel Rossetti and She (1887) by H. Rider Haggard by Brian Holland

Fear and sexual desire have often gone hand in hand, but Victorian men were particularly prone to the affliction. Each of these artists, one a painter and poet, the other a novelist, used his chosen medium to offer himself and his public the means to deal with these troubling emotions. Marked contrasts in approach arise from differences of personality and artistic choice, one celebrating the cult of beauty, the other taking refuge in misogyny; yet a number of parallels also emerge from this comparative examination of the two artefacts and their creators’ biographical background.