a new female aestheticism saw possibilities that liberated them from her legend

What does "a new female aestheticism" refer to? I couldn’t find any related line in the following this bit.

Feminine novelists had been persuaded that Eliot represented
their highest evolutionary stage, but in the early
twentieth century a new female aestheticism saw possibilities
that liberated them from her legend. Dorothy Richardson
discarded Eliot’s example simply because she thought
that Eliot wrote "like a man." Most of the feminist novelists,
however, detected a more complicated personality behind
the literature than had the Victorians. Craigie, who
wrote an essay on Eliot for the Encyclopedia Britannica,
saw in the famous intellectual restraint a heroic struggle
rather than a stony indifference.

A literature of their own