Nineteenth-century Women's Poetry Research Articles

"Bird, Jewel, or Flower?": On the Tokenization of Nineteenth-Century Women's Poetry

"Bird, Jewel, or Flower?": On the Tokenization of Nineteenth-Century Women's Poetry

Qajar Confection: The Production and Dissemination of Women's Poetry in Early Nineteenth-century Iran

Through a close reading of Nuql-i majlis, the first biographical anthology (tadhkira) produced in Qajar Iran of poetry by women, this study investigates the following questions about women poets and their works in the broader context of the literary developments in the period 1800–1840. What contribution did women make in the early nineteenth century to the production of poetry in Iran? To what extent can these women poets be considered active players in the Literary Return (Bāzgasht-i adabī)? What training did women receive in the poetic arts? To what extent and in what contexts did women act as patrons of poetry in this period? How was their poetry disseminated? And, perhaps most significantly, to what extent can this nineteenth-century women's poetry be viewed as part of a longer history of women's writing in Iran?

An Anthology of Nineteenth-Century Women's Poetry from France by Gretchen Schultz (review)

An Anthology of Nineteenth-Century Women's Poetry from France by Gretchen Schultz (review)

Augusta Webster Writing Motherhood in the Dramatic Monologue and the Sonnet Sequence

In many respects, recovery of Augusta Webster may be read as a feminist success story with a now familiar plot. Literary scholars of early- to mid-nineties seized on Webster's powerful dramatic monologues for their cultural and social significance, focusing particularly on her ideological engagement with urgent mid- to late-Victorian social questions related to female sexuality. More recent work has explored her closet dramas, literary reviews, publishing history, and biography. Safely enshrined in anthologies for past decade, Webster's frequent appearances in dissertations, journal articles, and books not only reveals impact of Victorian women's poetry on canon formation, but also ongoing relevance of central feminist questions about literary authority and women's writing. The critical awareness of and interest in Webster's writing might be read as evidence that recovery has done its work, and, as Margaret Russett observes, that gender studies have long since moved beyond reclamation (1) Yet scholarship on Webster's poetry also reveals ways in which literary scholars still struggle with some of same questions that faced feminist scholars thirty years ago. Although we have moved past basic debates over whether or not women authors should be studied at all, study of nineteenth-century women's poetry is still in a powerful transitional phase. As Alison Chapman remarks, the critical effects of recovery of forgotten voices are still making their mark and work of uncovering women's poetry is by no means completed. (2) In what follows, I will suggest a reading of Webster that I hope reveals not only how her work enriches our understanding of nineteenth-century poetry, but also illuminates some of challenges scholars continue to grapple with as they recover lost writers. I will focus on Webster's representation of motherhood. While her entire canon lies outside my scope here, I have chosen to concentrate on two works that I believe serve as touchstone pieces for Webster's interest in relation between maternity and literary creativity: Medea in Athens, a dramatic monologue from her most famous collection of monologues, Portraits (1870), and Mother and Daughter: An Uncompleted Sonnet Sequence (1895), a collection of posthumously published sonnets. Both works offer a complex and equivocal answer to question of whether or not motherhood enhances or undermines a woman writer's poetic authority. I argue that these texts attempt to demonstrate that motherhood can be an important source of creative inspiration for women, but literary forms in which Webster chooses to work--monologue and sonnet--also voice ambivalence about this idea. In Portraits, dramatic monologue performs maternal creativity only by showing impact of its loss, while Mother and Daughter questions sonnet's efficacy to represent mother-daughter bond even as it engages form. Indeed, Webster's sonnet sequence in particular, with its provocative portrayal of a mother-daughter relationship and a mysterious publishing history which suggests that Webster's male editors may have been responsible for its final form, might be seen as haunted by a ghostly matriarchal line that comes to fruition only through disavowal of poetic language and a (possible) abandonment of very tradition it attempts. My argument obviously owes much to legacy of second-wave feminism and critical engagement with motherhood and women's writing inspired decades ago by Adrienne Rich's Of Woman Born or French feminism as represented by Helene Cixous, Luce Irigaray, and particularly Julia Kristeva. But by taking a close look at both Medea in Athens and Mother and Daughter, I hope my investigation occasions close readings that bring recovery work into a larger conversation with rejuvenation of formalism. The initial recovery work of women poets tended to focus on social context and cultural representations of identity, particularly ways in which these writers engaged progressively with important political and social questions. …

An Anthology of Nineteenth-Century Women's Poetry from France. (MLA Texts and Translations) by Gretchen Schultz

248 Reviews science and artistic creation ismost visible. Novelists give an account of these tensions in theirworks and provide us with a rich landscape of a world in turmoil, unable fully to comprehend the nature of the progress that is being made. By careful analysis of a rich and well-defined corpus, the author has produced a study of the novel from an original perspective and given new insights into a world that was becoming evermore divided. University of Exeter Malcolm Cook An Anthology of Nineteenth-Century Women's Poetry from France. Ed. by Gretchen Schultz. (MLA Texts and Translations) New York: Modern Language Association ofAmerica. 2008. xl-f-368pp. $11.95. ISBN 978-1 60329-029-6. In Les Progres de lapoesie francaise depuis 1830 (Paris: Charpentier, 1874), Theo phile Gautier devotes only three pages of a total hundred to female poets, grouping them alongside 'regional' poets fromBrittany and Provence. Catulle Mendes, defin ing poetry as a 'metier d'homme' in Le Mouvement poetique francais de 1867 a 1900 (Paris: Imprimerie nationale, 1902), p. 200, dispenses with Lucie Mardrus, Anna de Noailles, Nicole Hennique, and Anne Osmont in a single page, concluding that 'la poesie des femmes ne devrait etre qu'un charme de plus dans lamaison' (p. 201). However, as Gretchen Schultz's biographies attest,many of the fourteen poets included here won prestigious literaryprizes in their lifetime despite fierce criticism from theirmale peers. Schultz's introduction to this excellent antho logy challenges the pernicious and reductive patriarchal forces which shape the creation of national literary canons, and their 'profound gendering of aesthetic values' (p. xviii), providing instead a refreshing selection of unjustly marginalized poets who, through intertextual dialogues, succeed in fostering a powerful sense of community and common purpose. The anthology is thus divided chronologically into three periods?Romantic (Desbordes-Valmore, Tastu, Gay de Girardin, Mer cceur, Colet), Parnassian (Ackermann, Blanchecotte, Michel, Siefert,Villard), and Symbolist (JudithGautier, Krysinska, d'Houville, Vivien)?and the texts selected display both intriguing correspondences with and striking divergences fromwhat literary history has come to regard as the dominant poetics of each movement. Familiar themes among the Romantics, for example, are love, beauty, sorrow, and loss, while the Symbolists articulate a sensual, ineffablemystery similar to that evident in theirmale counterparts. Themes uniting these diverse writers are theur gent search for an authentic and independent female poetic voice and the problem of inscribing a woman's memory and legacy among thegrands hommes de lapa trie;while their poetry often transcends gender to consider the human condition, Blanchecotte memorably cries 'Domptons l'homme, desarmons Dieu!' (p. 156). Indeed, several poets strike a forceful political tone, with Siefert's anti-Napoleon III polemic Les Saintes Coleres and Michel's anti-imperial tirades, while Vivien's dark, carnal lesbian verse, Vaillard's cynical satires, and Tastu's challenge to the MLR, 105.1, 2010 249 Church's inflexiblemodel of obedient femininity prove thatmother, daughter, and spouse are but three of the infinitelyvaried and complex visions ofwomanhood which these writers have to offer.This well-documented bilingual anthology, with a wide range of translation styles, is a first-ratepedagogical tool. Throughout, Schultz directs the reader towards the finest recent scholarship in the field (Adri anna Paliyenko, Aimee Boutin, Wendy Greenberg), and the current resurgence of academic interest in these writers suggests that themuch-needed reconsideration of the nineteenth-century canon, with all the benefits thatbrings to both teaching and research, iswell underway. University of St Andrews David Evans CEuvres poetiques completes, vol. ix. By Theodore de Banville. Ed. by Peter J.Edwards and Peter S. Hambly. Paris: Champion. 2009. 414 pp. 75. ISBN 978-2-7453-1876-3. Although substantial scholarly interest has eluded him, Banville's poetry inspired considerable debate during the nineteenth century, as the documents gathered here amply attest. Following a dozen minor poems discovered since the recent eight-volume critical edition of his complete poetic works, the editors present 350 pages of contemporary critical responses to Banville. As well as individual reviews of each of his seventeen verse collections bar only Amethystes and Roses de Noel, this includes a wide selection of vues d'ensemble, including well-known essays by Baudelaire (1861) and Mallarme...

ATHEIST PROPHECY: MATHILDE BLIND, CONSTANCE NADEN, AND THE VICTORIAN POETESS

Scholars of nineteenth-century women's poetry often recount that the sentimental piety – indeed, the quasi-religiosity – of the Victorian “poetess” disappears from women's poetry in the mordant irony of thefin de siècle.Virginia Blain, for instance, has recently identified Mathilde Blind and Constance Naden as representatives of “the new breed of post-Darwinian atheists” that comes to replace an earlier, implicitly Christian feminine tradition associated with Elizabeth Barrett Browning (Blain 332). On a related note, I have recently proposed that George Eliot'sLegend of Jubalcollections (1874, 1878) present a rather late instance of this poetess tradition (LaPorte 159–61). In what follows, I would like to argue thatfin-de-siècleiconoclasts such as Blind and Naden actually work hard to reclaim and redeem some of the prominent religious elements of the mid-century poetess tradition, and that Eliot's unusual combination of sentimental piety and religious skepticism gives them a particularly useful model for doing so.

Romantic Satanism and the Rise of Nineteenth-Century Women's Poetry

This essay proposes a reassessment of nineteenth-century British women's poetry, challenging prevailing teleological models of literary history in order to resist the illusion of feminist progress from the Romantic to the Victorian period. Although overshadowed in current critical accounts that focus largely on the Corinne/Sappho/Eve models of the fallen (distinctly sexualized) woman artist, Milton's Satan offered an equally important (and stubbornly unrepentant) precedent for women's intellectual and artistic ambition. Romantic Satanism persisted in "enlightenment," "Romantic," and "Victorian" women's writings, across the boundaries of literary periods (and gendered spheres) that we have retrospectively imposed. In fact, Romantic Satanism is visible in the most "feminine" poetic phenomenon of the century—that of the "poetesses" of the 1820s and 1830s, and their numerous poems lamenting "The Fallen Pleiad." Once we include Satan's recurring rise and fall among the precedents for women's literary struggles, Corinne and Sappho become alternate axes around which to organize our genealogies, not the starring heroines in a linear history.

A Shorter Shirazad: 101 Poems of Michael Field, and: Music and Silence: The Gamut of Michael Field, and: The Michael Field Catalogue: A Book of Lists (review)

Despite increasing interest in the poetry of Michael Field (Katharine Bradley and Edith Cooper), little of it is in print and even less has received critical attention. It appeared originally from small presses in attractive small editions of between twenty-seven and a few hundred copies. Revised editions in America added 100 copies of Long Ago (the same number as in England) and—the largest edition by far—925 of Underneath the Bough, and T. Sturge Moore's brief and often inaccurate A Selection from the Poems of Michael Field appeared in 1925. When the upsurge of interest in women poets, gay and lesbian writing, and literary collaboration brought Michael Field back into view about a decade ago, even the name was unknown to most professional Victorianists. But the work done in essays by Chris White in "'Poets and lovers ever more': Interpreting Female Love in the Poetry and Journals of Michael Field" (1990) and in Angela Leighton's Victorian Women Poets: Writing against the Heart (1992) has been followed by other critics, and the poems themselves have begun to reappear. Sight and Song and Underneath the Bough were reprinted in one volume (now out of print) in 1993, and there are substantial selections in recent collections of nineteenth-century women's poetry (Leighton and Reynolds, Higonnet, Armstrong and Blain) and Victorian anthologies (Collins and Rundle, Mermin and Tucker). Most of Michael Field's work is available online through subscribing libraries in the Chadwyck-Healey databases of English poetry and verse drama, although with only the "revised and decreased" second edition of Underneath the Bough, and without either the small 1930 collection, The Wattlefold, or, more distressingly, [End Page 621] Long Ago. Of the more than 900 published poems, however, some appeared only in periodicals, and many poems survive in manuscript but never were published at all.

Augusta Webster: The Social Politics of Monodrama

Augusta Webster: The Social Politics of Monodrama Patricia Rigg By the 1870s, when Augusta Webster had published two volumes ofdramatic poetry, Robert Browning had developed the dramatic monologue to a standard against which dramatic poetry was measured . Recent scholars ofthe dramatic monologue have continued the tradition ofdefining the genre exclusively through reference to male poets, primarily Browning.1 However, I think that we need to reconsider this association of the objective "mask" ofdramatic poetry with the masculine, for the fact is that Victorian women wrote a great deal ofdramatic poetry. Herein lies a dilemma: the dramatic monologue has consistently been associated with masculine reticence, particularly with an anti-Romantic, reactionary reticence on the part ofVictorian male poets to express the inner selfand project outward those passions that define the poetic self. Browning's public withdrawal ofhis private poetic voice and his decision to distance himself emotionally from his subject are well known. The general contrast to dramatic poetry is emotive, expressive, and subjective lyric poetry, a poetic genre which implies a close relationship between speaker and poet. The problem we face now is that, although it cannot be called "lyric," dramatic poetry by women tends to be less specific in defining the speaker, thereby retaining an important attribute of lyric poetry and delineating a rather transparent dramatic "mask." Dora Greenwell's "Christina," Amy Levy's "Magdalen," and most of Webster's Portraits and Dramatic Studies, for example, are all works that have been labelled dramatic monologues; however, in each ofthese works the speaker is vaguely, at times, abstractly, drawn. These speakers are all far more broadly representative types than are Victorian Review (200 1 ) 75 P Rigg Browning's Duke of Ferrara and Tennyson's Ullyses, for instance. We need to find some way to describe dramatic poetry written by women that is more flexible and less absolute than the polarized subjectivity ofthe lyric or objectivity of the dramatic monologue. The delineation ofthe speaker is only one reason that dramatic poems by a number ofnineteenth-century women are not easily classified as dramatic monologues. To demonstrate the differences among dramatic forms and to explore the ways in which dramatic poetry by women might be a genre separate from the dramatic monologue, I will consider here two ofAugusta Webster's dramatic poems that seem at first to be dramatic monologues, "The Happiest Girl in the World" and "A Castaway." Comparisons with Browning, I suggest, only contribute to a self-perpetuating critical myth with respect to much ofWebster's work. Both of these poems were published in Portraits (1870), a collection ofsingle-speaker poems that depict the speaker's response to his or her social context. Although the dramatic conventions ofparadox and irony that Browning integrates with poetic form and structure are elements of most ofthe poems in Portraits, rarely are they the ordering principles of the poem, even ofthose poems that we have been calling dramatic monologues.2 In fact, when irony is an integral feature of dramatic poems by Webster and by many other nineteenth-century women, it tends to point to the need for social change rather than to emphasize individual character. Furthermore, irony in nineteenth-century women's poetry can be complex, for it is often associated with the tension produced by antithetical desires: on the one hand, there is an implicit sentimental attachment to a domestic sphere increasingly eroded by the women's movement; on the other, this attachment is countered by resentment at the constraints ofa Victorian patriarchal society that limits women to this sphere. Webster tends to undermine the former and emphasize the latter, but her ambivalence about the possibility of re-defining the social politics of the "sphere philosophy" is evident in the two poems to be discussed here. Certainly, the tension in her poetry is not the tension produced by the lack ofself-knowledge typical of the speaker in a dramatic monologue. 76volume 26 number 2 Augusta Webster: The Social Politics of Monodrama Webster's poetic tendencies are consistent with her life interests: she was actively involved in the women's suffrage movement of the early70's and served as a member of the London School Board in the late 70's and...

Women's poetry, late Romantic to late Victorian: gender and genre, 1830-1900

Acknowledgements Introduction I.Armstrong & V.Blain PART ONE: CHANGING GENRES AND CODES ACROSS THE CENTURY: WAYS OF THEORISING WOMEN'S POETRY Misrepresentation: Codes of Affect and Politics in 19th-Century Women's Poetry I.Armstrong The Whip Signature: Violence, Feminism and Women Poets C.Walker Caroline Norton, 'The Picture of Sappho' Y.Prins PART TWO: THE MARKET AND THE POETESS: COMMERCIAL AND AESTHETIC VALUE The Poet and the Profits: Felicia Hemans and the Literary Marketplace P.R.Feldman Bijous Beyond Possession: The Prima Donnas of L.E.L.'s Album Poems C.E.Lawford Rewriting A History of the Lyre : Letitia Landon, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and the (Re)Construction of the 19th-Century Woman Poet L.H.Peterson PART THREE: LESBIAN POETICS Sexual Politics of the (Victorian) Closet or : No Sex Please - We're Poets V.Blain 'I Leave a Page Half-Writ': Narrative Discoherence in Michael Field's Underneath the Bough R.P.Fletcher Contradictions? - Amy Levy: Feminism and Semitic Discourse E.Francis PART FOUR: COLONIAL POETICS, NATIONAL IDENTITY Hearing Her Own Voice: Defective Acoustics in Colonial India M.Mukherjee Reviving Laurence Hope E.Marx Hemans and Her American Heirs: Nineteenth-Century Women's Poetry and National Identity T.Lootens PART FIVE: REMAKING DISCOURSES: GROTESQUE, DEVOTIONAL, SCIENTIFIC 'All Mouth and Trousers': Christina Rossetti's Grotesque and Abjected Bodies K.Burlinson Mysteries Beyond Angels in Christina Rossetti's From House to Home L.E.Marshall Theology and the Jewish Woman Poet C.Scheinberg Victorian Women Poets and Scientific Narratives H.Groth PART SIX: REREADING FORGOTTEN POETS Adelaide Procter: A Poetics of Reserve and Passion G.Gregory Why is This Woman Still Missing? Emily Pfeiffer, Victorian Poet K.Hickock Endnote C.Kaplan Index