Female Romantic Poetry, 1798–1819: the climate of fear and the loss of a radical generation

Abstract

ABSTRACT Many in England had already lost faith in the Revolutionary project by the time that Richard Polwhele published his infamous tirade against Mary Wollstonecraft and her “female band despising NATURE’S law”, “The Unsex’d Females” (1798). Linda Colley observes that pre-existing anxieties about the position of women became “still more intense in Britain after war with France broke out in 1793” (Britons: Forging the Nation, 259), and Polwhele’s poem reflects an increasingly reactionary climate in post-Revolution England, with hostility directed more and more towards outspoken women. This essay examines a range of overtly political poetry published by Mary Robinson, Anna Laetitia Barbauld, and Isabella Lickbarrow between 1792 and 1818. It suggests that understanding the pervasive culture of fear within which these women wrote allows us to better understand the conditions that produced the more conservative approach to poetic production taken by women like Felicia Hemans and Letitia Landon in the second decade of the 1800s.