Risorgimento Revolutionary Domesticity in Cornelia Turner’s Angelo Sanmartino

Abstract

When seeking to understand how British women writers contributed to the Italian unification movement (Risorgimento), scholarship has focused primarily on poets, the most famous of which is Elizabeth Barrett Browning, whose Casa Guidi Windows (1851), Aurora Leigh (1856), and Poems Before Congress (1860) appealed to the British government and public to support the Italians. Secondarily, scholars have also written about British women’s pro-Risorgimento journalism, translations, and travel writing, including work by Margaret Fuller and Florence Nightingale. Diana Moore terms their support as “revolutionary domesticity.” Missing from the scholarship of literary revolutionary domesticity is fiction. This article attempts to fill this gap by focusing on Cornelia Turner (1795–1874), a pro-Risorgimento writer and salonnière, whose two novels supported the Italian nationalist movement: Angelo Sanmartino: A Tale of Lombardy in 1859 (1860) and Charity: A Tale (1862). Although Turner’s novels did not achieve commercial success in her lifetime and have been rarely studied since, they nevertheless merit academic attention. Cornelia Turner’s work demonstrates just one example of what nineteenth-century British women writers can teach us about nationalism, networks, and how extrinsic voices created nations in Europe.