The Poetics of Sisterly Celebrity: Sarah Hale, British Women Poets and the Gift of Transatlantic Fame

Abstract

This essay explores the celebrity of British women poets in early nineteenth-century America, when print culture on both sides of the Atlantic encouraged and catered to the desire of readers for ever-closer relationships with poets by commercially circulating and disseminating their poems, biographical information and visual representations. It focuses on Sarah Josepha Hale’s participation and intervention in these cultural mechanisms by examining her gift book The Ladies’ Wreath: A Selection from the Female Poetic Writers of England and America (1837) and, in particular, its expanded second edition (1839). Reinforcing, while also complicating, celebrations of women poets in this period as figures associated with gentility, domesticity, sentiment and ideals of femininity, Hale draws on the discourse of fame and celebrity to underline women poets’ achievements and professionalization and the diversity, variety and intellectuality of their poems, and to position British and American women poets and readers within a transatlantic poetic sisterhood.