The idea of women as mysterious, sensual and disruptive forces is a recurring theme in late nineteenth-century art and writing. Goddesses, sorceresses and other mythical women are depicted as strong female figures, sometimes manipulative and unknowable, always powerful. Many works of the Victorian era suggest societal concerns about empowered women and the threats to spiritual, familial and domestic expectations. The Lady of Shalott, for example, embodies the tragic consequences for the disobedient woman who succumbs to lust.

Women in these paintings are rendered as decorative and erotic, with lush draperies and sensuous lighting to accentuate their curves. The intensity of colour, often rendered in shades of emerald or acid green, symbolises ambition, greed and jealousy. Dante Gabriel Rossetti and John William Waterhouse blend sensual beauty and mystery using mythical figures. Rossetti’s Astarte Syriaca shows the Syrian goddess of love as seductive with her gaze and fearless stance, while Waterhouse’s Circe invidiosa portrays the legendary enchantress Circe who turns humans into monsters. In these works we find, not the truth to nature of the early Brotherhood, but what critic John Ruskin called the ‘spiritual truth of myths’.