Negotiating identity: Mary Ellen Best and the status of female Victorian artists

Discusses the British artist Mary Ellen Best's (1809-91) chronological arrangement of her watercolours into albums highlighting their reflection of a change in her artistic activity around the time of her marriage. The author traces Best's training and early career as an artist, identifies a shift in her self-identification following her marriage from a semi-professional artist to a disinterested wife and mother, and concludes by arguing that Best's narrative reveals the difficult choices faced by middle-class Victorian artists during the early Victorian period.