“LADY'S GREEK” (WITH THE ACCENTS): A METRICAL TRANSLATION OF EURIPIDES BY A. MARY F. ROBINSON

Abstract

How to map women's poetry at the end of the nineteenth century was a question already posed by Vita Sackville-West in 1929, in her essay, “The Women Poets of the 'Seventies.” She speculated that the 1870s “perhaps might prove the genesis of the literary woman's emancipation,” as a time of transition when “women with a taste for literature” could follow the lead of Victorian poetesses like Elizabeth Barrett Browning, while also leading women's poetry forward into the future (111). According to Sackville-West, “Mrs. Browning” seemed an exemplary woman of letters to this generation, because “she had been taught Greek; her father had been a man of culture; and she had married a poet” (112). With the formation of women's colleges and the entry of women into higher education, however, another generation of literary women was emerging. What distinguished these new women of letters was a desire for classical education independent of fathers and husbands, demonstrating an independence of mind anxiously parodied byPunchmagazine: The woman of the future! she'll be deeply read, that's certain,With all the education gained at Newnham or at Girton;Or if she turns to classic tomes, a literary roamer,She'll give you bits of Horace or sonorous lines from Homer.Oh pedants of these later days, who go on undiscerningTo overload a woman's brains and cram our girls with learning,You'll make a woman half a man, the souls of parents vexing,To find that all the gentle sex this process is unsexing. As quoted by Sackville-West in her essay (114), this parody is an equivocal tribute to the generation of women just before her own. Although (in her estimation) the women poets of the seventies produced “nothing of any remarkable value,” nevertheless she admired their intellectual ambition: “a general sense of women scribbling, scribbling” was the “most encouraging sign of all” that the woman of the future was about to come into being, as an idea to be fulfilled by the New Woman of thefin de siècle(131).