Women’s Poetry, 2011

Abstract

A major achievement for study of Victorian women's is undoubtedly Mary Ellis Gibson's Indian Angles: English Verse in Colonial India from Jones to Tagore (Athens: Ohio Univ. Press, 2011) and companion Anglophone Poetry in Colonial India, 1780-1913: A Critical Anthology (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2011). While neither monograph nor anthology focus exclusively on women poets, both have important, and impeccably researched material, on women's contribution to Anglophone in era, and relations among colonialism, gender, and literary tradition in a colonial context. In particular, book's argument puts women's at centre of Anglophone poetry, in a deep conversation with a wide group of poets and three structuring concerns: the material histories of uneven development; geocultural history of transperipheral; and psychic history of what Homi Bhabha calls 'unhomlieness' (p. 7; reference is to Bhabha's The Location of Culture). In its rich, meticulously researched, and elegantly argued chapters distinguished by powerful close literary readings, Gibson puts and culture of at heart of English language culture in India. The main thrust of this argument is print culture of India, and its relationship to Britain and to Europe in general, in terms of colonial publication and circulation of newspapers, annuals, miscellanies, and belletristic volumes. Within this wide historical tracing of print media, Gibson's book always comes back to importance of literary codes, conventions, and genres, arguing overall that poetry can be thought of as a kind of pressure cooker for historical and ideological contradictions.... The pressure of poetic convention makes especially evident rifts and fissures within colonial scene of writing (p. 8). Part of methodology that is particularly effective here is teasing out of significance of extraordinary number of paratexts in Indian in English, through assumption that legibility is fundamental and yet problematic for these writers (p. 9). Although capacious in approach, and generous in its discussion of a huge number of poets, Indian Angles has a largely Bengali focus, and introduction defends decision through reminding us of centrality of Calcutta to publishing and reception of English language in colonial India, thanks to English administration that had its major center there (pp. 9-10). Each chapter of Indian Angles puts a woman writer in dialogue with men poets and with culture of Anglophone in India. In chapter one, of Anna Maria (about whom little is known), is placed in relation to late eighteenth-century Della Cruscan poets in London as well as dynamic between center and periphery. The discussion compares her to Sir John Horsford and Sir William Jones, who originated English language in India, and their different negotiations with both metropole and poetic tradition. The following chapter on bardic nationalism features English journalist Emma Roberts, colleague of Letitia Elizabeth Landon, whom she influenced through her representation of orientalism. Roberts is also placed within her friendship with East Indian writer H. L. V. Derozio. Chapter four concerns in more detail mimicry of poetic conventions embedded in colonial poetics, clustering together Kasiprasad Ghosh, Michael Madhusudan Dutt, and Mary Seyers Carshore (a woman writer of Irish parents who lived all her life in India, dying in 1857 uprising). Europhile and Christian convert Toru Dutt, already emerging in nineteenth-century studies as a major poet, is in next chapter put into dialogue with Mary Eliza Leslie, through ideologies of religion and domesticity. Moving into concerns of early modernism, especially late-century cosmopolitanism, aestheticism, and empire, Gibson juxtaposes of Sarojini Naidu with her British friend Arthur Symons, as part of a chapter that also pairs Manmohan Ghose and Laurence Binyon, and Rabindranath Tagore and William Rothenstein, Yeats and Pound. …