Re-reading Women's Poetry at the Turn of the Century

Recent critical studies undertaken by Talia Schaffer, Kathy Psomiades, and Yopie Prins have highlighted the diverse and experimental nature of women's writing at the fin de siècle. As well as encouraging a re-thinking of the canon of British aestheticism, these studies have also cast an interesting light upon the modes of analysis currently available to scholars working on Victorian women's poetry. In their introduction to Women and British Aestheticism, Schaffer and Psomiades argue that "the very notion of a female aestheticism enables us to rethink historical constructs of nineteenth-century culture and to revise our own contemporary critical paradigms." ¹ A similarly revisionist account can be found in Yopie Prins's Victorian Sappho, where the business of recovery (of "Sappho" and those subsequent writers who write in "her" name) forms part of a larger argument about the process of recovery and the "assumptions of [a] feminist literary history." ² These are, it seems to me, particularly valuable interventions, not simply because they cause us to re-read "lost" or "forgotten" writers, but because they prompt us to reflect upon the ways we read, understand, and categorize those writers. Successive phases of feminist criticism have enabled us to think in terms of a tradition of women's writing, and to continue to challenge the terms we use to define that tradition. By insisting upon a mutually informing relation between text and theory, as well as placing an emphasis on production and reception, these studies suggest some exciting new directions for the study of Victorian women's poetry.

Potentially the most exciting of these new critical developments is the attempt to come to terms with the idea of a female aesthetic poet. Following the lead given by Elaine Showalter, most twentieth-century criticism concentrated on those fin-de-siècle women writers whose work reflected and participated in political debates. As recent critics have noted, this orientation resulted in the loss of a body of women's writing which helped to re-shape British poetry long before the advent of modernism (Schaffer and Psomiades, pp. 16-17). The gradual recovery of a tradition of female aestheticism has helped to focus our attention on the inadequacies of feminist paradigms and literary history. New studies that elaborate the role to which women aesthetes aspired challenge our ideas about the construction of poetic identities and the feminine imagination. One writer whose work seems to me to exemplify the need for a rethinking of the ways we might recover women's poetry is Mary E. Coleridge (1861-1907). Coleridge is only one of a number of women poets whose work suggests an affiliation with aestheticist ideas. Yet she has benefited less from recent critical reappraisals of fin-de-siècle writing, perhaps because her contribution to aestheticism is often difficult to read in gendered terms. A brief consideration of her poetry might serve to illustrate some of the ways in which fin-de-siècle women's writing resists current categories.

Coleridge's reluctance to assume a gendered identity (she published her poetry under the pseudonym "Anodos") complicates the critical recovery of her poetry, making it difficult to position her in relation to the literature of the late Victorian period. However, as Virginia Blain notes, this may have more to do with the limits of our understanding of female traditions than it does with seemingly anomalous views expressed by Coleridge: "It might," she argues, "be premature to assume that the work of these women can be read as part of an isolated female tradition." ³ Coleridge's pronouncements on the subject of her pseudonymous identity suggest the burden of (feminine) selfhood: "Lest this I should grow troublesome and importunate, I will christen myself over again . . . and name myself after my favourite hero Anodos." ⁴ Here the business of assuming a pseudonymous identity becomes a positive act, a means of casting off the burden of selfhood in order to...