This study challenges masculinist assumptions relating to the stability and homogeneity of the Orientalist gaze. It argues that women did not have a straightforward access to an implictly male position of Western superiority. Their relationship to the shifting terms of race, nation and gender produced positions from which women writers and artists could articulate alternative representations of racial difference. The extent of women's involvement in the popular field of visual Orientalism is revealed and the presence of Orientalist themes in the work of Henriette Browne and George Eliot is...