Love's Mirror: Constance Naden and Reflections on a Feminist Poetics

Love's Mirror: Constance Naden and Reflections on a Feminist Poetics Marion Thain University of Birmingham MANY FORGOTTEN POEMS by unheard of "minor" Victorian women writers have recently been reprinted in a spate of anthologies dedicated to their work. However, the retrieval of texts can only be deemed worthwhile if it leads to a critical reassessment of the material offered. In this article I look at the work of the late nineteenth-century poet Constance Naden. She is a poet worthy of reconsideration in light of her theorising, within her poetry, of a feminist poetics. This can be traced in her response to a problem that persistently confronted the women writers of her time: how can a woman poet in the nineteenth century find her poetic identity in a tradition which relegates her sex to the position of the muse and the "other"? Naden was born to the wife of a Birmingham architect in 1858, and was educated in the city. She moved to London for the last year of her short life and the final struggle against ovarian cysts, from which she died in 1889. During her 31 years she became scientist, philosopher and poet; each discipline feeding the others, true to her belief in the interconnection of knowledge. Her study of the sciences at Mason College (which was later to become the University of Birmingham), combined with the influence of a charismatic Scottish freethinker, Robert Lewins, lead her to form her own monistic creed of "Hylo-Idealism."1 The most accessible trace of this philosophical achievement—her many publications on the subject being hidden in archives—is the subtitle of Oscar Wilde's "The Canterville Ghost: A Hylo-Idealistic Romance." 25 ELT 41: 1 1998 Indeed, in her lifetime, her poetry was not short of admirers, including not only Wilde, but also Prime Minister William Gladstone, who named her along with Christina Rossetti and Elizabeth Barrett Browning in his list of favourite women poets.2 Her poetry was published in two volumes during her lifetime (Songs and Sonnets of Springtime in 1881 and A Modern Apostle; The Elixir of Life; The Story of Clarice; and other Poems in 1887), and collected into a complete edition after her death by her friend and mentor Robert Lewins.3 Soon after this publication in 1894 she seems to have been forgotten, her work surviving in print only in the form of a misattributed extract in a book of humorous verse.4 Recently Naden's reputation has taken an upward turn, however. The revival of Victorian women's poetry has resulted in the reprinting of her work, including the electronic publication of her Complete Poetical Works at the "Victorian Women Writers Project" site on the World Wide Web.5 It is time, then, for a critical reappraisal.6 One of the most valuable and interesting aspects of Constance Naden's work is her revision of established poetics, in an attempt to overcome the Victorian ideological split between the concepts of woman and poet. Along with writers such as Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Naden is concerned with creating a theoretical space in which women can write. The problems facing the nineteenth-century woman poet are clearly expressed in Richard Garnett's introduction to the poems of Constance Naden which appeared in Alfred Miles's The Poets and Poetry of the Century, 1890-1900. Garnett writes that the poems' "main title to remembrance is the strong personal interest which they inspire."7 He argues they will fail to be read once those who knew her have died. Thus he conspires with the traditional evaluation of the work of Victorian women writers: he relegates it, along with its creator, to the sphere of the private, so denying it any literary value.8 This attitude stems of course from the strict division between the sexes, their spheres of activity and their characteristics, which was a mainstay of most Victorian social thinking.9 Women were to be confined to the domestic world, and serious literature belonged to the masculine sphere of public action. Victorian women could not, then, claim the authority necessary to write poetry without being seen as unnatural and unsexed. A potent theoretical and ideological divide...