Wicked Wolf-Women and Shaggy Suffragettes: Lycanthropic Femme Fatales in the Victorian and Edwardian Eras

Wicked Wolf-Women and Shaggy Suffragettes explores the intellectual, literary and visual culture at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries as a context for the emergence of the 'suffragette werewolf.' The unique characteristics of the suffragette werewolf will be identified and analysed in the context of contemporaneous social upheaval, as reflected in the imagery of the suffragette that was being produced at the time. A particular focus is given to Clemence Housman's 1890 novella The Werewolf, specifically her brother Laurence's illustrations for the 1896 publication. The images are analysed in light of Laurence's attempt to navigate his own Suffragette sympathies through a misogynist landscape and the dominant figurations of the rapacious, family destroying female werewolves within gothic literature.