Augusta Webster and the Lyric Muse: The Athenaeum and Webster's Poetics

Abstract

DURING THE LAST DECADE SCHOLARS HAVE SHOWN INTEREST IN NINETEENTH-century women who wrote in the dramatic form masculinized by such poets as Browning and Tennyson. (1) In her own day, Augusta Webster was compared favorably to Robert Browning, and she herself pays tribute to Browning in Transcript and a Transcription, a for Examiner of Browning's The Agamemnon of Aeschylus, a later collected in A Housewife's Opinions. However, Webster published in every genre, actually producing proportionately little in the way of dramatic monologue. In fact, in the last twenty-four years of her life, the prolific Augusta Webster published no dramatic poetry at all; consequently, we cannot assume that she defined herself as a writer of dramatic poetry. We need to take a more comprehensive look at a woman who promises to figure prominently in contemporary Victorian studies. Gaining insight into just how Augusta Webster did define herself as a writer has been complicated, I think, by her high profile socio-political life and by her feminist interests. Indeed, because Webster worked for the London branch of the National Committee for Women's Suffrage in the 1870s and served on the London School Board in the 1880s, we have naturally been interested in literary work that seems to us to reflect her feminist concerns. However, Webster had another profession from 1884 until her untimely death from cancer in 1894: she worked for the Athenaeum, primarily as a poetry reviewer. In this position she was able to articulate a fair[y complex system of poetics based on a balance of technical ability, innovation, and self-discipline. Significantly, this system pertains mainly to lyric rather than to dramatic poetry. In keeping with convention, her contributions to the Athenaeum were anonymous, but the marked editor's file, housed at City University London, provides an important context for a discussion of Webster's work. (2) These review essays are frequently comprehensive enough to allow Webster to situate poetic composition within a fairly extensive theoretical context. In 1881, three years before she joined the Athenaeum, Webster published A Book of Rhyme, included in which is a sequence of metrically ordered, inter-rhyming poems that she originally called English Stornelli, and later, in the 1893 reprint, English Rispetti. In 1881 as well, Webster wrote the earliest dated fourteen-line Petrarchan sonnet in her unfinished sonnet sequence that was published posthumously in 1895 as Mother and Daughter. Therefore, throughout the 1880s and early 1890s, Webster's poetic leanings were decidedly lyric, and the few dated sonnets suggest a continuity between the rispetti, the sonnets, and the critical reviews in the Athenaeum. I intend in this paper to study the English Rispetti, a controlled form with conventions of its own, within the context of some of the poetics Webster articulates so eloquently in the Athenaeum. While Webster's principles of poetic construction obviously evolved during her years as poetry critic, the pre-Athenaeum rispetti seem to apply all the important theoretical points relating to the balance of creative innovation and conformity to convention that she uses to measure excellence in the Athenaeum. Hence, Webster theorizes in her Athenaeum reviews the precision in language and attention to form that she demonstrates in the rispetti. In substance, as well as in language and form, the Rispetti mark an important phase in Webster's creative life, for the sequence is an ironic presentation of the complexity of human existence in its temporal and temporary state. One might argue that the human preoccupation with the brevity of life and the inexorable march of time has been a sustained preoccupation in literature, but the Victorian sense of time, drastically transformed into an understanding of the implications of deep time by the publications of Darwin and his predecessors, finds its way into a great deal of nineteenth-century literature) Webster's presentation of human life and human love, as much as her facility with the dramatic, connects her to Browning, for the rispetti underscore the irony of a human existence that is limited and finite even as they celebrate the power and mutability of human love. …