Nineteenth-century women poets

Abstract

Not so very long ago, anyone who was researching on pre-twentieth-century women poets was accustomed to being asked, “Were there any?” We have come on fast in the last couple of decades. It is almost 20 years since I attended a lecture series given by Roger Lonsdale in which he described the groundbreaking work he had been doing on the eighteenth-century women poets who he planned to include in his forthcoming Oxford anthology. For once, the term groundbreaking is hardly metaphorical. He had been rooting around in the depths of the Bodleian Library, uncovering collections that had never been catalogued: he would emerge at the end of each day literally covered in two centuries worth of dust. The lectures were enthralling, and the book that resulted, which appeared in 1989 [1], was not only a model of scholarship and a gift to those of us engaged in the practice of feminist literary history, but also an enormous pleasure simply to read. My own review of it appeared under the title “101 Grandmothers”, an allusion to what has since become (as Margaret Forsyth points out in her article) “almost a [literary] cliché”, Elizabeth Barrett Browning's lament: “I look everywhere for Grandmothers and see none”.[2] Since then, of course, the work of uncovering women's poetry from all eras has continued and many admirable anthologies have appeared [3], providing a foundation for the impressive body of scholarship that has recently been devoted to this new canon of texts.