Victorian Women Poets: An Anthology (Blackwell Anthologies)
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.Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.