Amal Clooney, Mrs Oscar Wilde, Kim Kardashian - the many faces of 'trophy wives'.

Trophy wives from Victorian times were smarter, better rounded and more cultured than those we associate with the term in today's popular culture.

The idea of women being treated as status symbols is not a modern phenomenon, according to new research from the University of Auckland.

English Literature researcher Dr Kirby-Jane Hallum says the popular culture idea of women being treated as their husband's status symbols is not so different from what happened during the Victorian era thanks to the Aesthetic Movement of the 1800s.

WOMEN LIKE OBJECTS

Although the valuing of women according to their beauty dated back for centuries, the arrival of the Aesthetic Movement in the second half of the nineteenth century generated new standards for female beauty, Hallum says.

Aestheticism was championed by Oscar Wilde and artists like Dante Gabriel Rossetti and William Morris.

These men surrounded themselves with fashion, art and interior design in order to reach a level of refinement that elevated their lives to a work of art.

Rossetti's wife and model Elizabeth Siddal was one of the era's best-known trophy wives and a muse for many pre-Raphaelite paintings. She was also a poet and artist.

The ultimate Victorian trophy wife pictured, left, and painted by her husband Dante Gabriel Rossetti, right. Photos: Wikimedia Commons.

Oscar Wilde's wife Constance Lloyd also embraced the Aesthetic Movement, styling herself carefully to fit in with the ideals her husband championed.

"People began to live their lives like an artwork.

"I was interested in how male characters became obsessed with surrounding themselves with beautiful objects and this included having a beautiful wife to complement their collection of fine art," Hallum explains.

Constance Lloyd eventually became estranged from Oscar Wilde, although they never divorced. Photos: Getty.

THE EVOLUTION OF THE TROPHY WIFE - KIM K

However, the type of women labelled as trophy wives more than 100 years ago is vastly different to the celebrities and super-rich considered trophy wives today.

Hallum uses the example of United States celebrity Kim Kardashian.

Kardashian is rich, superficial and influences fashion, similar to trophy wives of old, Hallum says.

Her husband, musician Kanye West, also has a say in what she wears and what she looks like.

Kim K, the millennial trophy wife? Photo: Reuters.

However, in Victorian times women were expected to be superficially beautiful and well-rounded.

They were also expected to be intelligent, play the piano, know about art and keep a household, she says.

And prospective wives had to be virgins to be desirable.

AMAL A TROPHY WIFE?

"It's the difference of high-culture versus popular culture."

Trophy wives borne out of the Aesthetic Movement were often bored and sought stimulating activities while their husbands were away from home, Hallum says.

This led to some wives becoming authors and joining the suffrage movement.

A better example of a modern women aligned with the Victorian idea of a trophy wife would be Amal Clooney, Hallum says.

The British-Lebanese lawyer and activist married actor George Clooney last year and she has the right mix of beauty and smarts.

George Clooney's wife Amal, truly well-rounded. Photo: Reuters.

Hallum is fascinated in the way women of the Victorian time constructed themselves as objects.

Her research traces the development of Aestheticism, examining the differences between the authors, including their approach, style and gender as she describes the interaction between popular fiction, the marriage market and the aesthetic movement between 1860 and 1890.

Hallum studied the books of Ouida and Marie Corelli, two popular female authors of the time, who wrote about the Victorian marriage market and the criteria for becoming a trophy wife.

The research looks at how women's beauty was valued in nineteenth century novels and the increased 'fetishising' of women's bodies. The era also featured a rise in vivid descriptions of heroines in literature, especially connected to the language of art and commerce.

"You get this proliferation of marbled arms, statuesque figures, burnished gold hair and ruby lips that consign the beautiful Victorian woman the status of a collected object on a marriage market that closely resembles the way paintings are bought and sold."

Hallum chose to use popular literature in her research.

She discovered that in an era where people publicly claimed to be reading Dickens and Bronte, the most popular books were in fact the equivalent of today's Mills and Boon romance novels or Fifty Shades of Grey.

A selection of the pre-Raphaelite paintings of women Hallum studied are set to go under the hammer at Christie's auction house in June for about £2 million

Her research has since been turned into a book called Aestheticism and the Marriage Market in Victorian Popular Fiction: The Art of Female Beauty.

It will be published this month by London publishers Pickering & Chatto as part of the Literary Texts and the Popular Marketplace series.

Hallum carried out most of her research during a three-month scholarship to the University of Birmingham in England.

She is now working on her second book, a study on the wives of New Zealand's nineteenth century premiers, Sir Julius Vogel, Robert Stout and William Pember Reeves.