This chapter focuses on the relationship between Walter Pater’s elusive personal life and his works. Addressing how the dynamics between the two have been a touchstone in criticism of Pater, it asks how we can reasonably read the autobiographical and self-reflexive dimensions of Pater’s writings. It illustrates how writers who encountered Pater – from Oscar Wilde to Edmund Gosse – reflected on the difficulties of knowing him beneath his courteous exterior. It considers how Pater himself figured personal life of writers and artists of whom he wrote. Addressing Pater’s ‘tact’ and ‘reserve’, quoting from the unpublished manuscript ‘The Aesthetic Life’, it considers Oxford Hellenism and the revelation of Pater’s involvement with William Money Hardinge.

This chapter provides approaches to reading Pater’s works for their remarkable literary style, with particular attention to his essay on ‘Style’ (1889) and passages from works including ‘The Child in the House’ (1878) and the Conclusion to Studies in the History of the Renaissance (1873). It begins by illustrating how Pater’s creation of atmospheres is intrinsic to his style as, to borrow his phrase, ‘a literary artist’. This style was focal in criticism of his works from very first reviews of The Renaissance. It identifies and analyses his characteristic vocabulary and its sensory effects, discussing Pater’s endeavours to locate the subjective origins of writing style in his essays before turning to analyse the unconventional phrasing that defined his sentences.

This chapter focuses on race in Pater’s works, contextualising these within the racial politics of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Western aesthetic discourse, especially in the work of two of Pater’s major intellectual influences, the art historian Johann Joachim Winckelmann, and the philosopher Immanuel Kant, who profoundly shaped the cultural context of discussions of art and beauty in the West. It analyses how Pater’s writings on classical Greek sculptures and the ancient Greek god Apollo responded to this earlier cultural history, focusing on his early essay “Winckelmann” (1873) and his later short story “Apollo in Picardy” (1893). The final section examines “A Study of Dionysus” (1876) and “Denys l’Auxerrois” (1886), works where Pater portrays the wine-god, traditionally depicted as the embodiment of Oriental excess, violence, and irrationality, in a manner that affirms marginalised forms of knowledge and ways of perceiving the world associated with “Orientalised” racial groups.

This chapter illustrates how gender is integral to Pater’s aesthetic philosophy and its subversive potential. It explains that renewal and rebirth were strongly gendered concepts in the Victorian period, showing that Pater’s understanding of sex and gender form a vital basis for the aesthetic philosophy he constructs across his literary oeuvre, a basis that revolves around metaphors of pregnancy and childbirth. It then develops an examination of how Pater reworks traditional Victorian gender categories to his ideas of renaissance and aestheticism in two sections: first, it shows how Pater’s concept of the renaissance is defined by a consistent metaphor of female reproductive biology, with attention to his figures of Demeter, Persephone, and Mona Lisa; second, it shows how Pater’s male figures create aesthetic meaning for these matrilineal cycles, with attention to Plato.

This chapter focuses on Pater as a classicist, placing his writings on the classical world and mythology in the context of the changing face of classical education at his contemporary Oxford, under Benjamin Jowett. It illustrates that Pater was sympathetic to dominant understandings of the classical world, but, beginning in the mid-1870s, began to explore darker and more subversive aspects of ancient Greek culture, including the myths of Demeter and Dionysus. It provides guidance on how to read and understand Pater’s representation of the classical world, in the context of classical education at Oxford, with examples from works including ‘The Marbles of Aegina’ (1880) and Plato and Platonism (1893).