Critical Voices recovers the histories of women—especially those of Alice Meynell, Florence Fenwick Miller, and Elizabeth Robins Pennell—who wrote at a time when art criticism was being consolidated as a professional discipline. Despite their substantial contributions in this moment, and despite their varied interventions in fin de siècle women's movements, late-Victorian women art critics have been largely overlooked in modern scholarship. Most recent accounts assume that art criticism was developed almost entirely by male writers and that women critics were not likely to view art any differently than their male counterparts. Countering these standard glosses, Meaghan Clarke argues that these writers both contributed to contemporary debates about art and “widen our understanding of feminist history, specifically feminist interventions in politics and visual culture” (1).

The book addresses a markedly broader range of topics than its title suggests. To be sure, Clarke fully considers only women critics writing from 1880 to 1905; influential predecessors such as Anna Jameson are not compared with later critics as much as they might be. But the book is not limited to women's art criticism: Clarke usefully situates her texts within general developments in periodical journalism and debates about contemporary art. The second chapter, “Art Criticism: Professional Patterns and Opportunities,” for instance, not only provides an excellent framework for her subsequent discussion of women art critics but will also prove useful for scholars interested in women's participation in nineteenth-century journalism. Likewise, Clarke contextualizes art criticism within late-Victorian visual culture. She examines visual representations of women art critics to demonstrate the vexed ways that they were received and discusses controversial paintings that were critiqued by these writers (thirty-six black-and-white illustrations are included in the book).

The main chapters of Critical Voices place the professional activities of Meynell, Fenwick Miller, and Pennell alongside those of contemporary artists and other critics. In her chapter on Meynell, who is now better known as a poet than as an art critic, Clarke describes her interventions in such diverse debates as those concerning the nude and French Impressionism. One of the most interesting sections of this chapter is on the relationship between Meynell and her sister, the artist Elizabeth Butler. Meynell promoted the work of Butler, who in turn made sure that her sister had access to private viewings at art venues. The description of this interchange is but one moment in the book when Clarke successfully illustrates the artist-critic relationships that were prevalent in the period.

In considering Meynell's feminism, Clarke delineates her essentialist rhetoric in advancing women artists such as Laura Alma-Tadema, whose gender supposedly provided her with a particular authority in painting domestic scenes. But Clarke also illuminates the contradictory positions taken by Meynell, who argued elsewhere that the “actions of women are human actions, and not necessarily perpetually feminine” (quoted in Clarke, 78). Clarke's account of Fenwick Miller's feminism in chapter 4 provides a nice counterpoint to Meynell's often essentialist approach. Fenwick Miller shunned separate art institutions for female artists (of which Meynell sometimes approved—even for her accomplished sister), believing that women should exhibit wherever their merit allowed. A particular goal of her writing and one that frequently put her at odds with such powerful male critics as F. G. Stephens was positioning certain women—Rosa Bonheur, Louise Jopling, and Henrietta Rae—as the kinds of artists that should be in the Royal Academy. Like some other contemporary art critics, Fenwick Miller did not limit her egalitarian arguments to art but explicitly linked them to education and suffrage.

Through Pennell, who reveals a particularly rich perspective as an American living in London, Clarke illustrates the conflicts among and instabilities within certain modern movements: the New Woman, the New Journalism, and the New Criticism. Perhaps as a result of feeling less bound by British Victorian strictures on women, Pennell frequently cycled through Europe, thereby associating herself with the New Woman. But Pennell was also a conservative version of this modern figure: she always rode with her husband, shunned such libertine values as free love, and was not directly associated with any women's movements. Most important to any assessment of her career, Pennell helped develop the New Critical emphasis on form over moralizing stories about art. As an American expatriate, Pennell was in an ideal position to promote on both sides of the Atlantic the works of the American artists James McNeill Whistler and John Singer Sargent, who later became models for the New Critics.

Closely associating herself with these famous artists also allowed Pennell to market her own work successfully. Indeed, Clarke shows how all three of her case studies shrewdly formed alliances with important artists, gave prominence to their own writing by quoting it (a practice fostered by the use of pseudonyms), and understood the needs of their audience. Yet the continued use of pseudonyms also meant that women were sometimes not given credit for the scope and distinctiveness of their work—a neglect that has been magnified in recent histories. Through her detailed research on this influential set of periodical journalism and by illustrating the challenges and successes of these particular writers, then, Clarke has fashioned an important intervention in the history of women's authorship.