British Women Poets of the Romantic Era: An Anthology

Abstract

Many readers still associate the Romantic era with six major poets: Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Wordsworth, Percy Bysshe Shelly, Lord Byron, John Keats, and William Blake. But recently, critics have challenged this all-male canon, pointing out that, during the Romantic period, women such as Joanna Baillie, Anna Letitia Barbauld, Felicia Hemans, Letitia Elizabeth Landon, Mary Robinson, Anna Seward, Charlotte Smith, and Mary Tighe were among the most highly respected and widely read practitioners of the art of poetry. In fact, Hemans was one of the bestselling authors of the nineteenth century, and Baillie was the foremost playwright of her time. In 'British Women Poets of the Romantic Era', Paula R. Feldman introduces modern readers to the range and diversity of women's poetic expression, making available more texts by more women poets of the Romantic era than have ever been collected in a single book in the twentieth century. Here are sonnets, odes, elegies, satires, songs, pastorals, anti-pastorals, love lyrics, epistles, long narrative poems, ballads, riddles, and a portion of an epic. Working-class poets, such as Christian Milne and Isabel Pagan, take their place among aristocrats, such as Lady Byron and Carolina, Baroness Nairne. Reflecting the realities of women's careers, poems that circulated in song and manuscript rather than as published books are also present, as well as the work of writers such as Jane Austen, Maria Edgeworth, and Ann Radcliffe, who are best known today for their novels. Feldman provides detailed introductions for each of the sixty-two poets, chronicling their lives, poetic careers, and critical reputations. This groundbreaking volume not only documents the richness of their literary contributions but also changes our thinking about the poetry of the English Romantic period.