SOURCE: “Male Patronage and Female Authorship: The Case of John Ruskin and Jean Ingelow,” in Princeton University Library Chronicle, Vol. 57, No. 1, Autumn, 1995, pp. 13-46.

In the following essay, Knoepflmacher uses the many letters John Ruskin wrote to Ingelow between 1867 and 1882 to explore the personal and professional relationship the two shared.

Highly popular as a poet in late nineteenth-century England and America, Jean Ingelow (1820-1897) has not regained her former reputation. Although a few of her verses are finding their way back into recent anthologies, she has hardly fared as well as Christina Rossetti, the writer to whom she was most often compared by Victorian reviewers. Rossetti herself rather nervously regarded “Jean Ingelow, the wonderful poet” as a “formidable rival to most men, and to any woman.”¹ Paradoxically, however, Ingelow's best known work today is a work of prose, her fantasy novel for children, Mopsa the Fairy (1869). Itself destined...