Anglophone Welsh Women’s Poetry 1750–84: Jane Cave and Anne Penny

Abstract

Feminist literary history has now reached that stage of maturity which includes the capacity not only to reflect, but also to move forward. Since the first outpouring of scholarship on eighteenth-century women’s writing in the 1980s, which focused on the recovery of women writers and their work, there has been an ongoing debate about the terms upon which women’s literary history is practised and the critical frameworks within which women’s writing is discussed.1 Despite the study of ‘British’ women’s writing ‘coming of age’ as a discipline, it is still the case that the histories and frameworks that we construct are predominantly Anglo-centred, especially in relation to eighteenth-century texts. Although ‘archipelagic’ literary studies have gained considerable ground in the last decade, the idea that we should be inclusively British in our approach to literary history is taking longer to establish itself as a key component to the study of women’s writing. More specifically, the fact that Wales is often hardly registered as one of the archipelagic nations in supposedly inclusive studies of British literature means that Welsh women writers suffer a double marginalization in terms of both gender and nation. If Anglophone writing by eighteenth-century Welsh men has been comparatively neglected, then the fate of their female counterparts has been doubly dire.2 KeywordsEighteenth CenturyNational IdentityLiterary HistoryBritish WomanOxford DictionaryThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.