Part I centers Italy in British heritage discourse, showing how nineteenth-century writers used Italy (especially Pompeii, Rome, and Florence) to redefine their own historical and political identities. Amid political resurgence and ongoing unification efforts, the long tradition in British writing of depicting Italy as culturally and politically dead faltered. In response to the Risorgimento, British writers deployed fractal and syncretism – two temporal forms that afford nonlinear historicisms. Rather than the timelines that locate Italy in a distant past, fractal and syncretism connect past and present. One result is a redefined political liberty that can transcend national, gender, class, and race boundaries, as I explore through forgotten transnational figures including the writer Susan Horner and the abolitionist Sarah Parker Remond.

The 1860s opened with a new geopolitical prospect for Europe: Italian unification, achieved in 1861. Elizabeth Barrett Browning, outspoken supporter of Italian independence, tracked the period of transition between the 1859 Second War of Independence and the creation of the new nation-state in her final work, collected in Last Poems[GK8] (1862). Though understudied patriotic poems like “The Sword of Castruccio Castracani,” “Garibaldi,” and “The King’s Gift” look forward to celebrate an anticipated national consensus, they also look back, working through public processes of mourning. Celebrating the unification of disparate kingdoms and imperial territories under a constitutional monarchy might have been particularly resonant for the UK as a nineteenth-century nation-state, as British enthusiasm for the Risorgimento suggests; however, attention to Barrett Browning’s transatlantic publication contexts and political-historical content , as the American Civil War began to unfold, reminds readers that civil strife and territorial dissolution remain ever-present undercurrents to nation-state creation.

Victorian culture encouraged the identification of women readers with male narrators and characters as a vehicle for female submission to male representation through marriage. This chapter argues that wayward women readers were not appeased by masculine identification, but rather inspired by it to act beyond the domestic sphere. In contrast with women authors such as Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Charlotte Brontë, and George Eliot, who were criticized for adopting conventionally masculine styles or subject matter, women readers were exhorted from girlhood in conduct guides and John Ruskin’s Sesame and Lilies lectures to prepare for absorption into their husbands’ legal identities through identification with male characters and activities. Written during the debates on the reform of marriage law that would continue through the end of the century, and published on the eve of the 1857 Matrimonial Causes Act, Barrett Browning’s Aurora Leigh promotes a distinctively literary rather than marital mode of identification with masculinity. Instead of identifying herself with her future husband, an action she associates with self-erasure, Aurora models a wayward identification with male poetic muses that allows her to maintain her integrity as an artistic subject.