-
1 Women Writers, Radical Rhetoric, and the Public
- Johns Hopkins University Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
c h a p t e r o n e Women Writers, Radical Rhetoric, and the Public 1212 Women and the Radical Temper When it appeared in 1979, the volume of the Biographical Dictionary of Modern British Radicals that encompassed the Romantic period listed 214 figures representing various occupations and avocations. Of these only four—Mary Hays, Catherine Macaulay, Helen Maria Williams, and Mary Wollstonecraft—were women, and they made up a mostly eighteenth-century coterie. Macaulay had died already in 1791 and Wollstonecraft in 1797. By the turn of the century Hays had turned from the overt social and political radicalism of her early fiction (roughly through The Victim of Prejudice [1799]) toward the largely pedagogical fiction of her later years. And Williams published virtually nothing between 1803 and 1815, though she remained faithful to the republican cause until her death (Baylen and Grossman). Mary Darby Robinson is conspicuously absent from the list of radicals, although the leader of the circle of Della Cruscan writers with which she was for some time associated , Robert Merry, is counted among them. Nor is Robinson’s exclusion the exception , for other women are missing, too, including poets like Charlotte Smith and the Irish writers Mary O’Brien and Henrietta Battier. Modern scholarship has until relatively recently been reluctant to acknowledge either the nature or the extent of Romantic-era women writers’ involvement in radical politics.1 Despite the increasingly reactionary climate that developed in Britain toward the end of the eighteenth century, many women writers nevertheless labored against it, deliberately entering into what was for most of them an often risky involvement with oppositional public politics whose dissenting nature was in their own time readily apparent to their contemporaries. Robinson had, after all, replied immediately and enthusiastically to Merry’s republican poetic celebration of the French Revolution’s achievements, The 38 British Women Poets and the Romantic Writing Community Laurel of Liberty (1790) with Ainsi va le Monde (1790). There, with an unmistakable reference to Thomas Paine’s work, she writes: Who shall the nat’ral Rights of Man deride, When Freedom spreads her fost’ring banners wide? Who shall contemn the heav’n-taught zeal that throws The balm of comfort on a Nation’s woes? (Selected Poems, 112, ll. 293–96) Like her radical contemporaries, Robinson makes the point that France’s lesson is not likely to be lost on other nations. Concerning Freedom, she continues: Nor yet, to gallia are her smiles confin’d, She opes her radiant gates to all mankind; Sure on the peopled earth there cannot be A foe to Liberty—that dares be free. (113, ll. 301–4) As if Robinson’s own italicized indication of Freedom’s universal audience did not already sufficiently embrace Britain, the next two lines—with their citation of that abiding Liberty which Romantic-era discourse among all parties celebrates as particularly British—cement the connection that radicals and reformers alike perceived in the revolution’s early stages. Robinson’s subsequent affiliation with the Morning Post (especially during Daniel Stuart’s tenure as manager and editor, when she served as poetry editor), brought her into closer contact with Coleridge and Southey, neither of whom had as yet entirely renounced his earlier republicanism. Furthermore, not only did this professional connection involve her in the day-to-day workings of a liberal paper but also her position as poetry editor (a position she held from 1799 until her death) lent her immediate access to an audience receptive to many aspects of the progressive agenda she encoded in her poems for that paper and that were encoded in others whose publication likely resulted from her editorial decisions. For a vastly popular poet who had already as early as 1793 been publicly touted as not just “the first Poet now living” but indeed “the first Poet,” her easy access to the Morning Post’s readership was an additional advantage in advancing her agenda, even though her “radicalism” was far less direct and conspicuous than the sort that we associate with male contemporaries like Thomas Spence or John Thelwall.2 Mark Philip has reminded us that for the most part early radicalism in Romantic -era Britain was “without doubt reformist rather than revolutionary in character” (22), and the point is especially relevant to the works of the period’s women writers. Radical writing took on a keen edge that itself reflected the violent rhetoric that was directed against British advocates of republicanism (French and otherwise...