My project is a comparative study of the mid-nineteenth and early twentieth-century reception of Dante, through works written by women during the Victorian era and dealing with Dante-related geographies. My project crosses three areas of study: women’s writing, the history of Dante’s transnational reception, and travel writing. This interdisciplinary intersection guided me in the choice of my case studies; all nineteenth-century women writers who travelled around Italy in Dante’s footsteps, focusing on retracing the poet’s biography (historical biography) and describing the political, social, and geographic features of the places he visited (travel writing).

My research aims to challenge the widespread assumption that, during the Victorian era, the field of Dante studies was an exclusively male world and to explore the literary and cultural relationship between the United Kingdom and Italy from a comparative and transnational perspective, which offers a broader comprehension of Dante’s legacy outside the Italian borders, at a time when he was often subjected to nationalist appropriation.

The project is funded by the University of Bristol's Faculty of Arts scholarship.