Mothers and Daughters: Poetic Generation(s) in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries

Abstract

Tr his essay continues a lengthy personal meditation on the sources of inspiration for women as literary artists in the later eighteenth century.' For this purpose I have tended to concentrate on poetry, because its being a preserve mostly of male writers in previous generations made it a natural arena for women seeking to define themselves as artists rather than as purveyors of mere commodities of print such as triple-decker novels. For the educated, genteel young woman of the Enlightenment, even when brought up within a restrictive code of behavior, poetry had become an approved mode of selfexpression and, like sketching or needlework, it served to demonstrate the accomplishment that was the customary goal of female education. But like those other modes of what women called their work, and perhaps even more so, poetry also had the capacity to transcend the limitations of the domestic enclosure, allowing its practitioner a sense of her self-worth as an individual creator as well as a shared ethos with others pursuing similar paths both in and beyond the domestic circle.