Victorian Women Poets Research Articles

CANON OR NOT CANON: THE CURIOUS CASE OF MICHAEL FIELD

Although they wrote more than thirty plays, nine volumes of poetry, around thirty volumes of diaries, and thousands of letters, Katharine Bradley and Edith Cooper, an aunt-niece duo, incestuous lovers and poets, more famous under their joint male pseudonym Michael Field, were almost unknown to a wider literary audience until the 1970s, when these two ‘minor’ Victorian women poets were rediscovered mostly by feminist critics. What first drew critics’ attention to this poetic pair was their dual authorial persona and the nature of their relationship, culminating in Lilian Faderman’s groundbreaking book Surpassing the Love of Men (1981). In the 1990s, critics such as Isobel Armstrong, Virginia Blain, Joseph Bristow, Holly Laird, Angela Leighton, Yopie Prins, Martha Vicinus, and Chris White shifted focus to their work, first to poetry and then to dramas and diaries. Finally, the first two decades of the twenty-first century confirmed the resurgence of interest in Michael Field, with critics such as Marion Thain and Ana Parejo Vadillo exploring this poetic duo within the wider context of fin-de-siècle literature.
 This paper will delve into various possible reasons why Bradley and Cooper, in spite of early positive reviews and the recognition of some literary greats of their age, were never granted a place among canonical British writers. Some of the avenues that will be explored are their fluid, queer identity and their refusal to define their gender; their tendency to write outdated literary genres such as verse historical dramas; the fact that they were female aesthetes, whose poetry was caught between paganism and Catholicism, homosexual and heterosexual love, femininity and masculinity, Victorian age and Modernism, tradition and modernity; their unwillingness to compromise their vision for popularity or commercial success; as well as their determination to create beautiful, well-designed books, published exclusively in rare and limited editions, which made them famous only among a small circle of connoisseurs.

Victorian Women Poets

Victorian Women Poets Heather Bozant Witcher (bio) A. Mary F. Robinson was best known, to her English audience, for her poetry and, to her French audience, as a woman of letters. So begins the introduction to Robinson's "Anglo-French" life in Patricia Rigg's A. Mary F. Robinson (Montreal: McGill-Queen's Univ. Press, 2021). Rigg seeks to reconcile these dual identities in this comprehensive and engaging biographical study. Rigg's book offers a nuanced look at an international poet: the unorthodoxy of Robinson's life, the integration of various literary styles (poetics, historical, biographical), and her Anglo-French identity. Highlighting Anglo-French literary communities and the social components of Robinson's life, Rigg's biography sets the tone for this year's scholarship on Victorian women poets. Its rich, layered approach—bringing together extensive archival material with personal and familial relationships (Rigg details her time in the Robinson family home and her relationship with Robinson's great-granddaughter by marriage)—offers a methodology that foregrounds materiality, affect, and form. Similarly, James Diedrick's edited edition for the MHRA Jewelled Tortoise Series, Mathilde Blind: Selected Fin-de-Siècle Poetry and Prose (Cambridge, U.K.: Modern Humanities Research Association, 2021) foregrounds Blind's contributions as a transnational and displaced (or expatriate) writer. His scholarly edition of Blind's late poetry brings three volumes (published between 1889 and 1895) together, alongside selections of her reviews and literary essays, to foreground Blind's experimental verse forms and affiliations with leading Decadent communities. The scholarship, then, of 2021 predominantly interrogates an intersectional approach to Victorian women poets: from exploring the ecological impact of Decadent poets to the intersections of poetry with a wide range of nineteenth-century sciences, transnational and cosmopolitan outlooks, and various modes of being. In this way, Victorian poetry becomes a site of curiosity, exchange, and engagement—in all senses of the word—with the world. In "Haptic Ekphrasis" (Victorian Studies 64, no. 1 [2021]: 88–114), Jill R. Ehnenn reconsiders the ekphrastic text, usually defined as a technology of vision: the relationship between word and image. In the Victorian period—and more broadly—ekphrasis involves not only vision but a technology of feeling, "both touch and emotion" (p. 89). In what Ehnenn calls "haptic ekphrasis," she identifies the centrality of affect and the sensing body as a method of [End Page 418] phenomenological interpretation and poetic encounter, or poetry's ability to do something, to move our bodies and brains into reconsiderations of the self/ object within the world (in both the nineteenth century and our world today). She makes three central claims. Focusing on haptics alongside vision enables reconsiderations of poetic form that foreground the "visceral register of experience" (p. 92). New ways of analyzing poetry emerge when we consider the tactility of the ekphrastic text or the arousal of emotion when we are attuned to meter and metrical variance. Rather than viewing ekphrasis as a description of an art object, haptic ekphrasis documents the poet's encounter with the art object. When reading poems like Elizabeth Barrett Browning's "Hiram Powers' Greek Slave" (1850) or Julia Margaret Cameron's "On a Portrait" (1876), with priority given to haptics, formal readings encourage sympathy for the object and what it represents. The language of sympathy here foregrounds another of Ehnenn's claims: that haptic ekphrasis resonates with the nineteenth-century discursive shift from sympathy to empathy (Einfühlung). Most intriguingly, perhaps, Ehnenn identifies haptic ekphrasis as a strategic technique for "minoritarian" (women and queer) writers (p. 100). Through insightful close readings of poetry by John Gray, Olive Custance, Julia Margaret Cameron, Graham R. Tomson, and the Bengali poet Sarojini Naidu, Ehnenn showcases how haptic readings communicate the complexities of lived experiences as a woman or queer poet. Not only, then, does haptic ekphrasis permit realistic detail and transportation of feeling, but "ekphrasis built on the haptic . . . permits the author to safely articulate the ineffable, the non-canonical, and the private" (p. 105). In providing a new framework from which to understand ekphrasis, Ehnenn points toward the phenomenological and epistemological potentials of poetic experience and poetic encounter—for both the Victorians and the twenty-first-century reader. Sight and...

The Cambridge Companion to Victorian Women’s Poetry, edited by Linda K. Hughes

Reviewed by: The Cambridge Companion to Victorian Women's Poetry ed. by Linda K. Hughes Amy Billone (bio) The Cambridge Companion to Victorian Women's Poetry, edited by Linda K. Hughes; pp. vii + 308. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2019, $79.99, $24.99 paper, $20.00 ebook, £59.99, £.99 paper. The Cambridge Companion to Victorian Women's Poetry is a groundbreaking work that offers crucial glimpses into the various avenues that future scholarship in this field will be able to pursue. The main problem that troubles the text—the question of how Victorian women's poetry can still be considered a category of its own—is foregrounded by Linda K. Hughes in her inspiring introduction and straightforwardly is addressed by Isobel Armstrong in her compelling afterword. Hughes wisely organizes the volume thematically rather than chronologically, with fifteen chapters grouped into four categories: "Form and the Senses," "Women's Poetry in the World," "Nurturance and Contested Naturalness," and "Reading Victorian Women's Poetry." Confronting millions of digitized pages from annuals, gift books, monthly or weekly periodicals, and daily newspapers (an overwhelming embarrassment of material available to readers today), Hughes follows a logical middle path, including both the well-known Victorian women poets who have dominated the canon until now and many previously unknown or little-discussed figures. Most prominently, scholars focus here on Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Christina Rossetti, with frequent references to Felicia Hemans, Alice Meynell, and Michael Field. However, in order to make evident the tremendous breadth of currently available material, the collection impressively offers analyses of more than one hundred Victorian women poets. The first section of the book, "Form and the Senses," is rich and multifaceted, bringing together formal issues in Victorian women's poetry (in essays by Monique R. Morgan and Meredith Martin) with questions of illustration (Lorraine Janzen Kooistra) and embodiment and touch (Jason R. Rudy). In her fascinating chapter "Haunted by Voice," Elizabeth Helsinger joins other scholars in the volume in her attentiveness to forms of silence that both troubled and intrigued Victorian women poets. Indeed, variations of the word silence appear over one hundred times in this collection. Given my own interests, I was pleased by critics' numerous observations about the complex affiliations between Victorian women's poetry and silence. At the same time, I was disappointed by the absence of attention paid to Victorian women poets' active involvement in the nineteenth-century sonnet revival. For example, Barrett Browning and Rossetti (both prolific sonneteers) are discussed more than any other poets in this book. Yet while Barrett Browning's Aurora Leigh (1856) is mentioned fifty-nine times in the collection, her grieving sonnets of 1844 are never discussed. These sonnets not only helped to inspire Robert Browning's love for her and were later reworked in her Sonnets from the Portuguese (1850), but also served as revisions of William Wordsworth's more compensatory sonnets. (Wordsworth wrote over five hundred sonnets and edited one of Barrett Browning's sonnets about him.) Similarly, Barrett Browning's dense yet very popular Sonnets from the Portuguese is mentioned only twice in the section on sonnet sequences in Morgan's chapter. But here no commentary is made about how Sonnets from the Portuguese revises Barrett Browning's grieving sonnets, which describe her incapacitating grief following her brother's death (the very death that haunts her amatory sonnets). Women's forceful role in the nineteenth-century sonnet revival is [End Page 150] neglected in the volume as a whole, perhaps because critics were working against the Victorian expectation that women write shorter lyric poems. Highlights include the multiple ways that critics in this volume show the heterogeneity of what it meant to be a Victorian woman poet. For example, Alexis Easley adds to gender other markers of difference such as race, class, age, ethnicity, religion, sexuality, and disability. Likewise, Alison Chapman echoes the recent global turn in literary studies by stressing how Victorian women poets embraced transatlanticism, transnationality, and cosmopolitism. Kirstie Blair adds another dimension to the unified way that Victorian women poets have been understood in the past, exploring class, regional identity, and dialect in working women's poems and showing how local verse...

Review: Second Person Singular: Late Victorian Women Poets and the Bonds of Verse by Emily Harrington

Review: Second Person Singular: Late Victorian Women Poets and the Bonds of Verse by Emily Harrington

Second person singular: late Victorian women poets and the bonds of verse

Emily Harrington offers a new history of women's poetry at the turn of the century that breaks from conventional ideas of nineteenth-century lyric, which focus on individual subjectivity. She argues that women poets conceived of lyric as an intersubjective genre, one that seeks to establish relations between subjects rather than to constitute a subject in isolation. Moving away from canonical texts that contribute to the commonly held notion that lyric poetry is an utterance made in solitude, Harrington explores the work of Christina Rossetti, Augusta Webster, A. Mary F. Robinson, Alice Meynell, and Dollie Radford to show how nineteenth-century poetic conventions shaped and were shaped by concepts of intimacy. Writing about relationships that are familial, divine, sexual, literary, and musical, these poets reconsidered the dynamics of absence and presence, and subject and object, that are at the heart of the lyric enterprise. Harrington locates these poets' theories of intimacy not only in their formal poetic practice but also in diverse prose works such as prefaces, literary and devotional essays, and unpublished letters and diaries. By analyzing various patterns of versification and modes of address, she articulates new ways of thinking about the bonds of verse and enlarges our understanding of verse culture in the late nineteenth century.

Refiguring the subversive in Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Aurora Leigh and Christina Rossetti’s “Goblin Market”

The standard critical reception of Elizabeth Barrett Browning as the first radical female poet of the English literary tradition is by now a popular one. To be sure, this assumption survives on two theoretical positions, viz: one, that Browning’s poetry falls outside the so-called “sentimental” poetic tradition of her female precursors and, two, that her poetry resists comparison, for that reason, with female precursors and/or contemporaries. The implication is that Barrett Browning’s poetry will only have to be compared with that of her male contemporaries such as Tennyson, Clough, Robert Browning and Arnold. While this comparative approach appears on the surface to endorse Barrett Browning’s poetry, it fails considerably because of its implicit assumption that the male poetic tradition is the starting point for discussing both the successes and failures of either a Romantic or Victorian woman poet. In order to re-align Browning’s aesthetic practices with her female contemporaries, I demonstrate in this paper the many angles from which Browning’s gynocentric strategies of subverting patriarchal hegemony in Aurora Leigh connect closely with those of Christina Rossetti’s “Goblin Market”. Using this comparative model, I hope to return Browning’s poetry to the larger feminist pool to which it rightly belongs. At the same time, I renegotiate the status of Rossetti whose reputation has suffered as a result of her poetry being judged in the light of male poets.

Negation, Selection and Substitution: Charlotte Brontë's Feminist Poetics

This article examines an early dramatic monologue by Charlotte Brontë and finds that Brontë pre-dates Victorian women poets in use of the form. Her early practice makes her a contemporary of Robert Browning and gives her precedence over Alfred Tennyson. The study investigates both how Brontë developed the form and why she introduced it into poetry. Without denying her childhood training in depiction of fictional figures, the findings point in the direction of Brontë's readings in seventeenth-century drama and her earlier writing of a short play as a more directly relevant background that made the monologue possible. Her personal motive for using it in poetry is initially a reaction to Robert Southey's discouraging response to her experience of poetry writing. The poem complains of literary marginalisation and asserts female poetic potentials. It embodies Brontë's culturally forbidden dream in an objective manner. However, the dramatic form proves to be more than a personal mask. It allows Brontë to contradict Romantic ideology and challenge patriarchal culture. Brontë's experience with the dramatic monologue in this poem on both formal and contextual levels should grant her better recognition in the poetic canon than that assigned to her so far.

Constance Naden’s Philosophical Poetry

AbstractThe recent movement to revise and revive the works of nineteenth‐century women poets had led to the rediscovery of the works of a Victorian botanist, geologist, philosopher, poet and atheist Constance Caroline Woodhill Naden. Most contemporary readings of Naden’s poetry are based on a feminist approach. This sometimes leads to regarding the philosophy that lied behind composing them as complementary to what is considered to be the main topic of her poetry: the position of a Victorian woman poet and philosopher in patriarchal nineteenth‐century England. Naden’s poetic legacy consists of only two collections of poems. Despite the fact that she completely stopped writing poetry in the year 1886 to dedicate herself fully to philosophical pursuits, her verses, however, suggest that composing poetry was not merely a pastime activity. Although it ranked second to science and philosophy, she still used her poetry in many instances to spread philosophical and scientific awareness in the face of religious beliefs and superstitions. This article aims to illustrate the eminence of philosophy, especially Naden’s own theory of Hylo‐Idealism, in her poetry, and the significant role her poetry played towards achieving Naden’s ultimate goal of illuminating the minds of Victorian women as well as men.

« A Woman’s Answer » : Adelaide Procter et la poésie face au genre

To avoid being trapped in the fury of feminist claims and to spurn the traditional gender ideology, some Victorian women poets take up a third discourse, ambiguous and protean. Adelaide Procter (1825–1864) chooses neither to fight nor to accept gender ideology. Her faith-driven poetry enables her to write in-between poems, keeping away from official authoritarian discourses, which support or deny the existence of gender spheres. Thus, Procter, as a feminist, writes poems defending feminine values whilst resisting to self-deprecation and to the excessive enhancement of virtues. Converted to Catholicism in 1851, Procter, as a Tractarian, uses her poetry, both religious and feminist, as a weapon against the construction of political and poetical patterns. Being Anglo-Catholic, she can create a feminine and autonomous space from where she gives her own interpretations and turns away from official discourses.

Mary Hutton and the Development of a Working-Class Women’s Political Poetics

is impossible for the truly generous mind to understand the small envyings that surround the daily path of an author, particularly a female one. Mary Hutton, Preface to Cottage Tales and Poems (1836) What do we know about the working-class women who wrote poetry the Victorian period? As so often happens in the study of non-canonical writers, their biographies exist in fragments, a miscellany of facts with very little cohesion. We may know that a writer was a factory girl or a domestic servant; however, we often know little of the circumstances in which she wrote, her family history, or the particularities of her work. It seems that the lack of extant working-class women's poetry lies in the historical (de)valuations surrounding their lives; the difficulties in recovering their texts is, in part, linked to the unavailability of biographical information. Perhaps deemed too unimportant by the establishment for a record of their lives to be kept, nineteenth-century working-class women poets all but disappeared from historical record, and we are only now in the process of rediscovering them. While male working-class poets have enjoyed a rebirth with the work of Michael Sanders, Ian Haywood, and Roy Vickers, (1) the study of working-class women writers is still in its nascent stages. Mary Hutton is one such writer who has been neglected until now in scholarship on working-class poetry. Hutton's rediscovery was first recorded in Ian Haywood's The Literature of Struggle: An Anthology of Chartist Fiction, in which Haywood names Hutton the only author of Chartist Fiction. (2) Recently, John Goodridge's Nineteenth-Century English Labouring-Class Poets: 1800-1900 (3) collected five of Hutton's poems, and Patricia Johnson gives a passing nod to Hutton in her study of the development of Ethel Carnie's Feminist Vision. (4) Florence Boos, whose work has reinvigorated the study of working-class verse, mentions Hutton in Class and Victorian Poetics and has done much to illuminate the possibilities within working-class women's writing. In her study of the resonances of working-class women writers, she works to belie critical assumptions that Victorian women's preoccupations with religion vitiated their verse. (5) Following the recuperative momentum of Boos's paper, I argue for Hutton's important role in the formation of a working-class political discourse in Victorian poetry. This study of Hutton's poetical negotiations of politics and class seeks to enrich the present initial discussion of a new discourse of poetic politics: that of the working-class woman of the 1830s and 1840s. In order to understand the politics underpinning Mary Hutton's poetry, we must attend to the ways in which her poems enter into the political discourses of the early 1830s--namely, issues surrounding the New Poor Law, poverty, and slavery. Boos has pointed out that most Victorian working-class women poets had little direct access to the Chartist movement and its cultural institutions (Boos, 'Nurs'd Up,' p. 153). Despite this fact, Hutton's poems on the Poor Law and poverty are strikingly aligned with the poetry of the Chartist movement in both her appropriations of images of slavery and her use of discourses on human rights and freedom. (6) In this paper I wish to show how Hutton engages with nineteenth-century class politics and how her use of simple diction and her engagement with themes that resonate with Chartist poetry earns her a place as a de facto Chartist poet in the canon of nineteenth-century working-class literature. What little we know of Hutton's life and work, we learn from two contemporary middle-class male sources. The first is William Cartright Newsam's The Poets of Yorkshire: Comprising Sketches of the Lives, and Specimens of the Writings of those 'Children of Song' who have been Natives of, or otherwise connected with the County of York (1845), and the second is the preface to Hutton's first work, Sheffield Manor and Other Poems (1831), written by John Holland. …

<em>Christian and Lyric Tradition in Victorian Women's Poetry</em>, by F. Elizabeth Gray

Reviewed by: Christian and Lyric Tradition in Victorian Women’s Poetry Maria LaMonaca (bio) Christian and Lyric Tradition in Victorian Women’s Poetry, by F. Elizabeth Gray; pp. 264. London and New York: Routledge, 2009, £75.00, $103.00. “Why,” queries F. Elizabeth Gray, “do we need to examine Victorian women’s religious poetry? There’s a lot of it; a lot of it is very much the same; a lot of it is quite frankly doggerel; and even when ‘good’ poets write it, their secular verse holds much more appeal for the modern taste” (3). This question reveals both Gray’s bravery and ambition in devoting an entire study to a subset of Victorian poetry that many of us have no qualms about ignoring. We know, of course, that Christina Rossetti and Elizabeth Barrett Browning wrote about religion in creative and compelling ways, but in this study Gray is just as passionate—if not more so—about recuperating a multitude of relatively (or completely) forgotten writers and poems. Figures such as Rossetti, Barrett Browning, Felicia Hemans, and Adelaide Procter are discussed alongside Edith Skelton, Emma Frances Bevan, Elizabeth Ayton Godwin, Augusta Theodosia Drane, and Mrs. A. Stuart Menteath, among others. A significant contribution of this study is simply reminding us of the role and proliferation of women’s religious and devotional poetry in the Victorian era. We know that “producing literature was in fact a vital part of Victorian women’s practice of Christianity” [End Page 667] (14), but certainly much more attention has been paid to women’s contributions to so-called religious or controversial fiction than verse. Gray plunges into this vast body of work “to suggest new ways of reading religious women poets that interrogate the obscurity masking or dismissing their contribution to social, cultural and Christian narratives, and to contend that the work that these women did, in the form of religious poetry, made a significant contribution to Christian discourse, to lyric tradition, and to contemporary views of womanhood” (1). While the book may be more successful at achieving the former goal than the latter, it raises some interesting questions about Victorian women poets and prompts reflection on the challenges inherent in studying Victorian women’s religious and devotional literature as a whole. The book’s first chapter forms an extension to the introduction; both sections lay out the author’s contention that Victorian women’s religious and devotional verse is worthy of serious and respectful scholarly treatment. Gray defines devotional poetry as a subset of religious verse: a form of poetry that grows out of the practice of religious worship, and “take[s] already established theological interpretations as a starting point and discuss[es] their application” (17). Such verse, she argues, “was insistently gendered feminine by the Victorians, and as insistently distinguished from ‘masculine theological writing’” (17). Not only was devotional poetry a feminine genre, but it was written by “Christian women . . . for other Christian women,” and these “women poets created the rules by which this body of verse was to be read and valued, and they created an identity for a devout, feminine, yet still privileged follower of Christ” (9). The book’s second chapter focuses on how Victorian women poets engaged with Scripture, both questioning “the biases and assumptions of androcentric scriptural texts,” and drawing upon the Bible “as a resource or prototype for creativity” (9). Chapter 3 explores Victorian poets’ appropriations of female biblical characters, which “argued for contemporary relevance and predicted future expansion of the female role” and engaged with the issue of women’s exclusion from “spiritual, secular, and literary histories” (9, 10). Chapter 4 addresses the construction of personal relationships in women’s devotional poetry, in particular the “production of a feminized I that could particulate in direct relationship with God” (10). Chapter 5 examines the aesthetic conventions of women’s devotional poetry, boldly arguing that what we might dislike most about such writing—its sentimentality, clichés, and excessive ornamentation—“should be read as a particular and legitimate form of expression, moulded by cultural exigencies, and vividly eloquent about the conditions influencing its own formation” (10). I agree wholeheartedly with the book’s premise that Victorian religious...

« Anywhere out of this room » : les poèmes énigmatiques des poétesses victoriennes

Victorian women poets, along with certain Pre-Modernist ones (from Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Laetitia Landon or Christina Rossetti to other, less well-known ones today, such as Dora Greenwell or Adelaide Procter), have written some disturbing and informal poems that do not always meet accepted Victorian generic or thematic standards. As the reader peruses these poems, he/she feels strangely close to them since he/she is invited to share the enigma or secret that will remain concealed, provoking further frustration. Revelation is perpetually postponed to another space, strange and boundless as well as foreign, whose language the reader will have difficulty coming to terms with. This space therefore points towards another poetical, forever indeterminate, territory.

JANET GEZARI. Last Things: The Poems of Emily Bronte.

Virginia Woolf conjectured in 1916 that Emily Brontë's poems might ultimately outlast her novel. But that has not yet happened; nearly a century after Woolf's observation, Brontë's poetry is still studied largely for the light it throws on Wuthering Heights. In Last Things, Janet Gezari, who edited Emily Jane Brontë: The Complete Poems for Penguin in 1992, sets out once more to remedy the continued neglect of this body of work. Gezari's stated goal is to offer ‘new ways to read Brontë's poems and new reasons for wanting to read them’ (p. 1), but by ‘new’ Gezari does not mean au courant. Instead, she provides the most sensitive, sympathetic, discriminating account of the work to date, and in the process draws out Brontë's very real merit as a lyric poet whose work repays close study. The continued critical neglect of Emily Brontë as a poet is striking, given that there has been a surge of work on Victorian women poets since the 1990s. Gezari points out that Brontë's poems are excluded even from a recent anthology of Victorian women poets, and that feminist critics have had relatively little to say about them. She rejects the paradigm of the woman poet struggling with a male muse through which Margaret Homans and Irene Tayler have read Brontë's poetry. Gezari instead reads the poems very closely, paying attention to their handling of meter, rhyme and other elements of prosody. She teases out the effects of versification on Brontë's meaning with an ear finely attuned to the music of Brontë's verse. Additionally, she considers individual poems in relation to the others and to the canon of lyric poetry and poetics from the Romantics to such modernist poets as Hardy and Geoffrey Hill, with glances across the Atlantic to Dickinson and Poe. In other words, she treats Brontë as a poet, first and foremost, without regard to gender or other questions of identity or ideology, and with only enough attention to other discursive contexts to illuminate the poems on which she focuses.

"Syren Strains": Victorian Women's Devotional Poetry and John Keble's The Christian Year

“Syren Strains”:Victorian Women's Devotional Poetry and John Keble's The Christian Year F. Elizabeth Gray (bio) Ye whose hearts are beating high With the pulse of Poesy, Heirs of more than royal race, Framed by Heaven's peculiar grace, God's own work to do on earth, (If the world be not too bold), Giving virtue a new birth, And a life that ne'er grows old— Sovereign masters of all hearts! Know ye who hath set your parts? He who gave you breath to sing, By whose strength ye sweep the string, He hath chosen you, to lead His Hosannas here below;— Mount, and claim your glorious meed; Linger not with sin and woe. —— John Keble, "Palm Sunday"1 John Keble seems to have had very little to say about women, and, at first glance, very little to say to women. He taught no female students. His Lectures on Poetry were delivered and published in Latin, unintelligible to most Victorian women,2 and briefly mention only one woman poet, Sappho. Whenever discussing poets—and Christians—Keble uses exclusively the masculine pronoun. However, as Isobel Armstrong and more recently Cynthia Scheinberg have persuasively argued, the Tractarian poetic theory espoused and demonstrated by Keble contributed in important ways to the expressive poetics within which nineteenth-century women could both claim poetic identity and also maneuver to critique the cultural construction of their subjectivity.3 At a fundamental level, Tractarianism's emphasis on feeling and perception in poetry could provide a potent sanction for women to write. The importance of investigating the "distaff side" of Tractarian poetics, and Keble's particular [End Page 61] role in its development, has become central to an understanding of female poetics; as Emma Francis argues, "Without a proper appreciation of Keble we will continue to misunderstand several aspects of the role and the extent of the legitimation of the Victorian woman poet."4 The subtle and fascinating refractions of Tractarian thought in the work of pre-eminent Victorian devotional poet Christina Rossetti have been meticulously traced by scholars including Kachur, Arseneau, Schofield, and D'Amico.5 William Michael Rossetti commented that his sister "thought nothing of Keble as a poet," a suggestive comment in light of her transformations of Keble's Christian Year in the "Some Feasts and Fasts" section of her 1893 Verses.6 In this article I address less familiar women poets to assess how and why they copied Keble's poetic model and developed it for their own ends. One aspect of Tractarian poetic theory that remains relatively neglected, and one that has particular significance in assessing the resonance of Tractarian poetics for women, is its concern with issues of originality and imitation. The Oxford Movement dedicated itself to returning the Church of England to the history and tradition that, it believed, had been lost since the Middle Ages; this dedication took form in Tractarian poetics in the various literary changes rung on Keble's famous dictum, "Don't be original!"7 This dictum implicitly linked originality—stylistic as well as doctrinal—with heresy. Theologically, the Tractarians sought assiduously to follow the doctrines of the pre-Reformation Church. In terms of rubric, Tractarians insisted that appropriate language with which to discuss religious matters was the same as that authorized and exemplified by the Fathers, in the orthodox, patristic formulations passed down through the Church. And poetically, orthodoxy and correctness was to be ensured by following approved models. Appropriate subject matter, according to Keble, was to be found in the moral lessons taught by Nature (through the process Keble called Analogy) and in the emotional responses of the religious and sincere heart. Furthermore, appropriate examples of treatment were to be found in the works of certain poetic fathers, including Gray, Collins, Cowper, and Wordsworth: departures from proven poetic quality were not encouraged. "Primary poets," writes Keble, "do not strain after novelty."8 Keble disparages ambition, effort, and affectation, stating that true poetry is "not in high-wrought subtlety of thought, nor in pointed cleverness of phrase" (Lectures, 2:201). Echoing Keble, John Henry Newman also considered the question of originality in "Poetry, with Reference to Aristotle's Poetics" (1829), arguing that true...

BOOK REVIEW: Edited By Alison Chapman.VICTORIAN WOMEN POETS (ESSAYS AND STUDIES). Cambridge and Rochester, NY: D. S. Brewer, 2003.

BOOK REVIEW: Edited By Alison Chapman.<b>VICTORIAN WOMEN POETS (ESSAYS AND STUDIES)</b>. Cambridge and Rochester, NY: D. S. Brewer, 2003.

Victorian women poets

Victorian women poets

In Time, and Out: Women's Poetry and Literary History

Angela Leighton is professor of English at the University of Hull. She is author of, among other books, Shelley and the Sublime: An Interpretation of the Major Poems (1984), Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1986),and Victorian Women Poets: Writing against the Heart (1992). She is writing a book on form and the aesthetic in nineteenthand twentieth-century poetry.

What Kind of a Critical Category is "Women's Poetry"?

When Ana Parejo Vadillo and I decided to organize 2002 conference Poetry and Fin-de-siecle, several of my colleagues asked whether this focus on was not old-fashioned now. For many in Britain women's writing is seen to signify purely a feminist political stance in which one argues for value of against an assumption that it is forgotten or undervalued. (1) Yet this is not just a category created for a late-twentieth-century political gesture, which can therefore be discarded when that act of recuperation is deemed to be over: it is, as we shall see with particular reference to work of May Kendall, a category which existed to shape identity and a framework for reading in later nineteenth century. It is shifting critical currency of term women's poetry, within field of late-Victorian studies, that I want to explore here. differences between conception of women's represented at Isobel Armstrong, Virginia Blain, and Laurel Brake's 1995 Rethinking Women's Poetry: 1730-1930 conference and that apparent at 2002 Poetry and Fin-de-siecle conference might be a useful starting point. Certainly in 1995 sense in which women's was a recuperative term was still in air. (2) In contrast, discourse of forgotten was hardly in evidence by 2002 conference. But if 1995 conference was an important marker of that initial moment of rediscovery, it was also to act as a catalyst for critical trajectory which we followed thereafter. Armstrong and Blain's book is subtitled and Genre, 1830-1900; emphasis of volume is on the investigation of gender and its interplay with (Preface, p. xiv). Charting involvement of poetry in a wide range of discourses and debates has occupied us since. If there was a change apparent in 2002 conference agenda aired in 1995, it might be subtle twist of focus Gender and Genre to, more specifically, Gender as Genre. debate about genre of gender was, of course, already apparent in 1995 conference in concern of several speakers with historical role played by category women's and necessity, to current critical thinking, of understanding generic qualities of this label. Yopie Prins' published paper this conference begins by stating need to theorize and historicize a category that we assume to be self-evident: namely, woman (3) Anne Mellor, about Romantic literature, adds to this discussion of woman poet as a generic category by arguing for need to distinguish between tradition of and female-authored poetry which does not conform to this practice: tradition of female (4) It is this attempt to interrogate deceptively unified term women's which interests me here. questions raised in these papers have become more and more insistent in our thinking about women's as we have moved farther away importance of term as a recuperative one. Susan Brown, in her extremely useful chapter on The Victorian Poetess (2000), does much to provide an overview of recent growth in number of personas recognized as possible positions for Victorian woman poet. For Brown, even one category of poetess contains many possible personas. (5) She goes on to make chronological claim that from 1870s onward, explicit invocation of is more critical than poetic (p. 196). She cites Elizabeth Sharp's 1890 Women Poets of Victorian Era as an accurate reflection of mood of previous two decades. What we have here, writes Brown, is a new poetess, rather like her fictional counterpart New Woman (p. 197). (6) This sense of women's referring to a multiplicity of established personas became one of recurring themes of 2002 conference on fin-de-siecle poetry. …

Making Christ: Alice Meynell, Poetry, and the Eucharist

We too (one cried), we too, We the unready, the perplexed, the cold, Must shape the Eternal in our thoughts anew, Cherish, possess, enfold. --To the Mother of Christ The Son of Man Meynell, whose poetry is seldom read or anthologized today, eighty years after her death, was so venerated by her contemporaries that she was on two occasions suggested for Poet Laureate. an almost hagiographical address to the Royal Society of Literature in 1914, Sir Henry Newbolt compared Meynell's verse to that of the Metaphysicals, declaring it conveyed union of wit and religious emotion as rare now as it was characteristic of the seventeenth century in England (qtd. in Badeni 227). Sir Henry's attempt to categorize Meynell's remarkable, slender, disciplined verses has been duplicated by many other admiring but somewhat puzzled critics. Sir Henry was not the only one to suggest that Meynell's poems belonged in centuries past; her friend and admirer G. K. Chesterton stated that she differed from most of the advanced artists of the period in the detail that she was facing the other way, and advancing in the opposite direction (11). After decades of undue neglect, a small number of literary critics have recently turned to Meynell's condensed and witty poetry, and, again, their reevaluations have investigated the puzzle of forebears and of locating this Victorian who is not entirely a Victorian. Vanessa Furse Jackson allies herself with Chesterton and Sir Henry in noting the seventeenth-century influence on Meynell; Sharon Smulders has traced Meynell's debt to the Romantics. a recent volume on female aestheticism, Talia Schaffer makes a persuasive case for reading Meynell's essays as significantly contributing to the artistic movement of the fin de siecle. Maria Frawley reads Meynell's verse as modernist, foregrounding issues of identity and cognition. Part of Meynell's challenge as a poet is that she straddles traditions that to our modern eyes appear incompatible. Angela Leighton and Margaret Reynolds, in their volume on Victorian women poets, judge Meynell's political and activities to be quite distinct from one another: In spite of her political and journalistic activity, Meynell's poetry remains largely personal and lyrical (510). Schaffer is even more explicit about the split she sees in Meynell as artist: Alice Meynell managed, though at some psychological cost, to be both an Angel in the House and a suffragist (32). While Schaffer claims Meynell as an aesthete and avant-garde experimentalist, Smulders, who also sees Meynell as negotiating with ideological incompatibilities, defines those elements very differently. Taking up Chesterton's description of Meynell as Radical in her opinions and a Tory in her tastes (7), Smulders argues that Meynell's political radicalism, as expressed in her war poetry, is complicated by her conservative traditionalism in religion and poetic style. We owe these scholars a considerable debt for reopening the critical discussion of a complicated artist and for provocatively directing us to the creative complexities of her poetry. I seek to contribute to the recuperation and reevaluation of Meynell's verse by suggesting that the periodizing effort related to her artistic incompatibilities may actually help create the limitations and divisions it studies. My aim is to argue for the fundamental coherence of Meynell's style, faith, and feminism. Thus, while Smulders has suggestively highlighted Meynell's use of a transmutational trope (Feminism 172-74), I take up that insight but look beyond the overtly political verse to that which may seem most traditional and inimical to feminism--Meynell's poems exploring the beliefs and practices of Roman Catholicism. Her ongoing engagement with issues of creativity and artistic legacies may be illuminated more fully through an examination of its foundation: belief in a Christian God, adherence to the traditions of the Holy Roman Catholic Church, and reverence for the divine capacity of the Word. …

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.