Irish women poets of the romantic period: a different sort of other

Abstract

Because literary-historical scholarship has largely ignored the work of the numerous Irish women poets active during the Romantic period, this article introduces some of these poets and their work, surveying some of the principal themes and preoccupations of their poetry in relation to the work of their contemporaries both in England proper and in Scotland. The discussion addresses the apparent double disadvantage faced by Irish women poets, who had to contend with culturally conditioned biases involving both their gender and their nationality, and it examines some of the means by which the poets dealt with these difficulties. The article traces briefly the trajectory of this body of poetry, which evolved from the often fiercely partisan and nationalistic verse of the later eighteenth century into a less immediately and visibly contestatory poetry by the beginning of the Victorian period. This later poetry appears by comparison also to be less insistently “Irish” in nature; much like the poetry by women of Scotland in the same years, it came to tend toward a conventional Christian moralizing, on one hand, and a seemingly generic and even sentimental regionalism, on the other. At the same time, however, the poetry of these Irish women may be seen to articulate an alternative paradigm to the troubled political and cultural relationship between Ireland and England historically typified by a belligerent and masculinist hostility, an alternative paradigm that embodies behaviors traditionally associated in Western culture with the feminine and with sisterhood