Victorian Women Poets and Scientific Narratives

Abstract

Victorian women poets represent poetry as a humanizing agent in a society where economic and social hierarchies are increasingly being defined in terms of scientific explanations of the natural world. Nature is a topos women poets invoke to represent and analyse a cluster of ethical concerns such as the nature of violence between individuals and nations, economic exploitation, moral degeneration, and the transformative powers of the poetic imagination. The work of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Christina Rossetti, Augusta Webster, Dora Greenwell and Mathilde Blind provides a rich and complex textual field for examining the representation of these issues in women’s poetry written between 1830 and 1890. Rossetti, Webster and Greenwell were contemporaries and correspondents who defined their work in differing ways against Elizabeth Barrett Browning. Blind, who began her publishing career in the 1870s, also defines her work explicitly in relation to Barrett Browning, but also circulated in the same intellectual milieu as Rossetti. The selection of these poets has been guided as much by their difference from one another as by their similarities, as part of a more general attempt to complicate and diversify the critical category of the woman poet.