Greek mythology shaped late-Victorian culture through the dissemination of the writings of

Walter Pater, the poetry of Charles Algernon Swinburne, and the paintings of late-Romantic

Aesthetic artists such as Edward Burne-Jones, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and Frederic Leighton.

Evelyn De Morgan (1855-1919), who exhibited alongside these male artists as early as 1877

and throughout her career, was equally inspired by Greek myth in her paintings. This talk

explores the links between De Morgan’s Demeter Mourning for Persephone (1906) and

Alfred Tennyson’s Greek poem “Demeter and Persephone” (1889). Walter Pater’s essay on

Demeter and Persephone will also serve as a point of reference. How are the themes of the

symbolic narrative of separation, duality, regeneration, and identity evoked by Tennyson

and illustrated by De Morgan? What is the role of intermediality in the interpretation of the

association between word and image?

Leslie Howard is a PhD candidate at the University of Toulouse Jean Jaurès within the

research center “Cultures Anglo-Saxonnes.” Her research focuses on the paintings of Evelyn

De Morgan, Victorian visual art, Aestheticism, Greek mythology, gender, and the

Renaissance. Leslie holds a dual BA in the History of Art and Political Science from the

University of Florida and a master’s degree from the University of Toulouse Jean Jaurès in

Anglo-Saxon Studies. This past year she taught as a graduate teaching assistant at the

University of Lorraine