Mabel Sharman Crawford’s Life in Tuscany: Ulster Radicalism in a Hot Climate

Abstract

Mabel Sharman Crawford (1821–1912) was the daughter of the Ulster radical landlord and politician William Sharman Crawford, and a committed radical and feminist writer and activist. Her Italian travelogue Life in Tuscany (1859) approaches Italy through a highly political and proto-feminist lens that is strongly influenced by her activism both in the interest of Irish land reform and as a member of the Central Committee of the National Society for Women’s Suffrage . This essay will consider Sharman Crawford’s construction of the “Italian problem” through her writing, the extent to which she translated both the Irish agrarian reformism and democratic Chartism associated with her father’s parliamentary campaigns into her analysis, and the nature of her own feminist critique of Italian society in the post-revolutionary moment of 1848–1849.