For many years Ruskin has seemed, at best, a conservative thinker on gender roles. At worst, his lecture "On Queens' Gardens" from "Sesame and Lilies" was read as a "locus classicus" of Victorian patriarchal oppression. These essays challenge such assumptions, presenting a wide ranging re-evaluation of Ruskin's place in relation to gender, and offering new perspectives on continuing debates on issues of gender in the Victorian period, and in our own.