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Introduction
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Introduction 1212 We have all of us one human heart. —William Wordsworth, “The Old Cumberland Beggar” (1800; comp. 1798) Ay, fair as are The visions of a poet’s solitude, There must be something more for happiness; They seek communion. —Letitia Elizabeth Landon, “Erinna” (1827) What We Know and What We Thought We Knew At the beginning of A Christmas Carol, Charles Dickens insists that we bear in mind that Jacob Marley’s death is a fact. “There is no doubt that Marley was dead,” the narrator tells us. “This must be distinctly understood, or nothing wonderful can come of this story” (39). Any effective tale relies on the ability of its hearer—and its teller—to distinguish between what is and what merely seems to be: Ebenezer Scrooge must learn this as surely as Hamlet had to learn it. When it comes to assessing the poetry written and published by women in the British Isles during the Romantic period, it is useful to separate what we know from what we only think we know. For this is not a tale simply about the Romantic literary canon or about the cultural wars that have during recent years attended the interrogation of that canon, at least in the academic world. Several decades of scholarship and numerous waves of theory have brought us to the present moment in which a wholesale reassessment of “British Romanticism” is occurring, as scholars, teachers, and students rethink a 2 British Women Poets and the Romantic Writing Community literary and cultural “movement” that was for nearly two centuries stereotyped in terms of a small group of male poets. The consequences of this oversimplification were many, as we now realize. For one, while the male poets were lionized, the other literary genres were routinely overlooked—or simply depreciated—by institutional academe, so that even so central a novelist as Walter Scott was eclipsed while Jane Austen was typically categorized—her composing and publishing dates notwithstanding —as an “eighteenth century” novelist in the comedy of manners tradition. So neglected was Romantic-era theater that even today it remains largely unexamined except by the most committed specialists, despite the immense interest—a paying interest at that—demonstrated by the contemporary public in all forms of theatre and theatrics, “legitimate” and otherwise. So too has the expanding field of literature for children and young readers generally been overlooked, although publishers of the early nineteenth century quickly realized the economic rewards of producing cheap editions for this market that the spread of literacy (combined with the moral earnestness promoted by the evangelical movement no less than by the reactionary political right) was creating. The historical reality is that the Romantic literary community was more diverse and more dynamic than could possibly be intuited from the old six-poet model of British Romanticism with which generations grew up. What is true of Romantic literary genres is no less true of Romantic-era ideology. It is instructive to remember, right from the start, that in terms of both politics and poetics the majority of the Romantic era’s writers did not occupy the left-of-center ground on which we usually think the canonical writers stood. For one thing, literary history (like cultural history) has always been fond of retrospectively heroizing its radical, liberal, or otherwise oppositional figures. Frequently myopic when it comes to genuine talent and enduring value, the “popular” critical establishment represented in the mainstream mass media (then as now) often lionizes what eventually proves to be ephemeral and mediocre at the expense of greater talents that are permitted to languish under inattention or, perhaps more often, withering criticism. Afterward, when time sorts out what contemporary professional critical opinion is seemingly so loath to do, things change and praise is forthcoming—often, paradoxically , when the artist is no longer alive to appreciate it. Canonical and noncanonical writers alike understood that the odds were almost always against them; for the few—like Scott or Byron, Hemans or Landon—who attained fame during their lifetimes, there were always the many who labored in ignominy and obscurity, consigned alike by public whim and critical disapprobation to history’s dustheap. The private and public writings alike of Romantic authors reveal how many of them chafed at the critical depreciation of their talents in the face of the praise [44.204.164.147] Project MUSE (2024-03-19 03:29 GMT) Introduction 3 regularly accorded to other, often considerably lesser, writers. That subsequent literary history has in...