Victorian Women Poets: An Anthology (Blackwell Anthologies Series) / Edition 1

by Angela Leighton, Margaret Reynolds

Overview

This reader contains sixteen new and recent essays addressing work by, and issues raised concerning, Victorian women poets. Among those discussed directly are: Elizabeth Barrett Browing, Emily Bronte, George Eliot, Michael Field, Felicia Hemans, Adelaide Proctor, Christina Rossetti, and Rosamund Marriott Watson. Key topics dealt with include the nature of home,the market, the fallen woman and the moral law, the mother, and the muse.

Critics represented are: Isobel Armstrong, Kathleen Blake, Susan Conley, Stevie Davies, Sandra M. Gilbert, Gill Gregory, Terrence Holt, Linda K. Hughes, Angela Leighton, Tricia Lootens, Jerome J. McGann, Dorothy Mermin, Margaret Reynolds, Dolores Rosenblum, Chris White, and Joyce Zonana.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780631176091
Publisher:	Wiley
Publication date:	10/28/1995
Series:	Blackwell Anthologies Series
Pages:	691
Product dimensions:	6.12(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.51(d)

About the Author

Angela Leighton is a Reader in English at the University of Hull. She is the author of Shelley and the Sublime (1984), Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1986) and Victorian Women Poets: Writing Against the Heart (1992), and co-editor with Margaret Reynolds of Victorian Women Poets: An Anthology (Blackwell Publishers, 1995).

Table of Contents

Introduction.

Acknowledgements.

Felicia Hemans:.

1. Hemans and Home: Victorianism, Feminine 'Internal Enemies', and the Domestication of National Identity (1994): T. Lootens.

Elizabeth Barrett Browning:.

2. From Patria to Matria: Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Risorgimento (1984): S. M. Gilbert.

3. The Embodied Muse: Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Aurora Leigh and Feminist Poetics (1989): J. Zonana.

Emily Bronte:.

4. The Mother Planet (1994): S. Davies.

George Eliot:.

5. Armgart - George Eliot on the Woman Artist (1980): K. Blake.

Adelaide Procter:.

6. Adelaide Procter's 'A Legend of Provence': The Struggle for a Place: G. Gregory.

Christina Rossetti:.

7. Christina Rossetti's Poems (1980): J. J. McGann.

8. Christina Rossetti's Religious Poetry: Watching, Looking, Keeping Vigil (1982): D. Rosenblum.

9. 'Men sell not such in any town': Exchange in Goblin Market (1990): T. Holt.

Michael Field:.

10. The Tiresian Poet: M. Field.

Rosamund Marriott Watson:.

11. 'Fair Hymen holdeth hid a world of woes': Myth and Marriage in Poems by 'Graham R. Tomson' (Rosamund Marriott Watson) (1994): L. K. Hughes.

General:.

12. The Damsel, the Knight, and the Victorian Woman Poet (1986): D. Mermin.

13. 'Because men made the laws': The Fallen Woman and the Woman Poet (1989): A. Leighton.

14. 'Poet's Right': Christina Rossetti as Anti-Muse: S. Conley.

15. 'A Music of Thine Own': Women's Poetry - an Expressive Tradition? (1993): I. Armstrong.

16. 'I lived for art, I lived for love': The Woman Poet Sings Sappho's Last Song: M. Reynolds.

List of Contributors.

Bibliography.

Index.

Editorial Reviews

The woman poet, as a socially sanctioned phenomenon, is a 19th-century creation. This long overdue anthology brilliantly documents the woman poet's self-fashioning; two introductory essays and copious biographical notes on each of the 51 poets here allow us to relate greats Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Christina Rossetti to those whose work was uneven, but who played an important part in the emerging tradition of women's poetry, such as Felicia Hemans, L.E.L. and the sexually charged aunt-niece team Michael Field. Dismissed by modernism as ``too feminine,'' this tradition can now be seen to have had intellectual and social preoccupations neither quaint nor irredeemably sentimental. By canny selection, the editors (both are British academics) reveal the poets as women working through the Victorian ideology that would have them be either pictures of domestic virtue or madwomen in the attic. (Oct.)

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