Women's Poetry, Late Romantic to Late Victorian: Gender and Genre, 1830-1900, and: Victorian Women Poets (review)

Women's Poetry, Late Romantic to Late Victorian: Gender and Genre, 1830-1900, edited by Isobel Armstrong and Virginia Blain; pp. xviii + 408. Basingstoke: Macmillan; New York: St. Martin's Press, 1999, £50.00, $69.95.

Victorian Women Poets (Dictionary of Literary Biography: Volume 199), edited by William B. Thesing; pp. xx + 380. Detroit and London: Gale Research, 1998, $165.00, £115.00.

In July 1995 I attended "Rethinking Women's Poetry 1780-1930," sponsored by Birkbeck College, University of London, where most of the essays in Isobel Armstrong and Virginia Blain's Women's Poetry, Late Romantic to Late Victorian were first presented. The air was electric with a sense that something truly new was being done, that after sustained attention to Victorian women's literary narratives, the lyric and other verse forms were coming to the fore. Despite temperatures in the high 80s outside and mere ghosts of breezes entering third-floor windows within, discussion after each panel had to be forcibly cut off throughout a thirteen-hour day of continuous sessions.

Six years later, the results of that intellectual ferment in 1995 can be assessed. Poetry by Victorian women--not just Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Christina Rossetti but an entire roster of figures--is now visible within the field of Victorian studies. Anthologies of nineteenth-century women poets edited by Catherine Reilly, Angela Leighton and Margaret Reynolds, Isobel Armstrong and Joseph Bristow, and Margaret Higgonet have appeared since 1994, and another edited by Virginia Blain will be issued by the time this review is in print. Moreover, Poetry of the 1890s (1997), edited by R. K. R. Thornton and Marion Thain, and the Broadview Anthology of Victorian Poetry and Poetic Theory (1999), edited by Thomas J. Collins and Vivienne J. Rundle, integrate women poets among the men as a matter of course. Even the Norton Anthology of English Literature has modestly expanded canonical authors to include Felicia Hemans among Romantic poets, Michael Field among Victorian.

Women's Poetry, Late Romantic to Late Victorian and the Dictionary of Literary Biography volume dedicated to Victorian women poets provide important adjuncts and spurs to further study of poetry now available or awaiting discovery. If the Armstrong and Blain and William Thesing volumes both derive from that impetus surfacing in the 1990s to move beyond poets Barrett Browning and Rossetti in women's studies and Victorian poetry, they offer differing strengths. Women's Poetry, Late Romantic to Late Victorian may seem to privilege women's tradition but is most effective when it integrates discussion of women poets with cultural studies, issues of literary form, and the work of male poets. Whereas this collection tends to eschew biographical frames of reference (though urging more in-depth biographical research), biography is of course the raison d'être of the Dictionary of Literary Biography and its principal strength. But Volume 199 of the series also contrasts with the Armstrong-Blain collection because most of its essays pivot around Barrett Browning, who (with the notable exception of one essay) merely hovers about the margins of Women's Poetry, Late Romantic to Late Victorian.

Armstrong and Blain organize their volume around theorized frameworks, the literary marketplace, lesbian poetics, national identities, cultural discourses, and two sample recuperations of neglected figures. Armstrong's "Msrepresentation" (one of three theoretical essays) argues that the empathy early-nineteenth-century women poets were enjoined to promote was staged against a backdrop of gaping social rifts and pervasive violence, resulting in the pathologizing of women's lyrics, to which Armstrong then rigorously applies psychoanalytic, Marxist, and philosophical tools. In "Personifying the Poetess," Yopie Prins's innovation is to integrate the death of the author theorized by poststructuralism with women's studies. If Caroline Norton's "Picture of Sappho" (1840) raises questions about representation and presence through its self-conscious rhetorical...