A Vindication of the Redhead

A Vindication of the Redhead  investigates red hair in literature, art, television, and film throughout Eastern and Western cultures. This study examines red hair as a signifier, perpetuated through stereotypes, myths, legends, and literary and visual representations. Brenda Ayres and Sarah E. Maier provide a history of attitudes held by hegemonic populations toward red-haired individuals, groups, and genders from antiquity to the present. Ayres and Maier explore such diverse topics as Judeo-Christian narratives of red hair, redheads in Pre-Raphaelite paintings, red hair and gender identity, famous literary redheads such as Anne of Green Gables and Pippi Longstocking, contemporary and Neo-Victorian representations of redheads from the Black Widow to The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, and more. This book illuminates the symbolic significance and related ideologies of red hair constructed in mythic, religious, literary, and visual cultural discourse.  

Brenda Ayres, now semiretired, teaches online English courses for Liberty University and Southern New Hampshire University, USA. 

Sarah E. Maier is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of New Brunswick Saint John, Canada. 


Ayres and Maier have coedited several collections of essays. The most recent are The Theological Dickens (2021), Neo-Victorian Madness: Rediagnosing Nineteenth-Century Mental Illness in Literature and Other Media (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020), Neo-Gothic Narratives: Illusory Allusions from the Past (2020), Animals and Their Children in Victorian Culture (2019) and Reinventing Marie Corelli for the Twenty-first Century (2019).