Eighteenth-Century Women Poets and Their Poetry: Inventing Agency, Inventing Genre

Chapter One: Introduction

c h a p t e r o n e Introduction I’d sooner lead a dancing bear, Than bow my neck to Fashion’s yoke. — e l i z a t u i t e The eighteenth century was a time of tumult and revolutionary change in the public and private spheres. Scarred at the beginning by the Interregnum, regicide , and the Glorious Revolution, it concluded with the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars. The British learned to justify empire building, a parliamentary monarchy, and the transportation of its citizens to America and Australia . The War of the Spanish Succession made Britain the major slaving nation, the battle of Plassey and the Seven Years’ War confirmed its imperialist identity, and the American War of Independence humbled it; all tested the nation’s sense of itself, especially as the premier example of ‘‘liberty.’’ In the first half of the century the British Empire was ‘‘essentially an Atlantic one,’’ but by 1815 ‘‘the whole of eastern India, most of the peninsula and a large part of the Ganges valley ,’’ the coast of Ceylon, and the island of Mauritius belonged to Great Britain.∞ The Jacobite rebellions, the Sacheverell, Wilkite, and Gordon riots, and the proliferation of political societies and associations are but signs of ideological battles and the costs of change. Crime, homelessness, and poverty rose, and controversies over who should be educated to what extent and in what manner flared through the century. ‘‘The middle classes and even the poor became increasingly 2 Eighteenth-Century Women Poets and Their Poetry politicized,’’ historians agree,≤ and sustained debates about the nature and rights of people of various classes and ethnicities inflected discourses about the sexes. In spite of these forces, much was stable, including the centrality of the monarchy and the Protestant religion, control of Parliament and the courts by the landed elite, and faith in the constitution. Although manufacturing, commerce, and international trade accelerated, Britain was still largely a rural, agrarian society. Patriarchy remained the ideology of the state and the family, and even such shifts as from dower to strict settlement and jointure tended to strengthen it.≥ The British continued to see themselves as a benevolent people, and as the parish charity system proved inadequate, foundling and lying-in hospitals were established. Another constant was war: only brief periods were free of it. The war years were 1702–13, 1715 (the Jacobite Rebellion), 1718–29, 1739–48, 1756–63, 1775–83, and 1793–1815. Just as these events and issues were the subjects of poems by men, so they were for women, and even when they are not central, traces of them tint men’s and women’s writings and their texts’ public reception. In a nation aspiring to superiority in arts and arms and for whom the metaphor of the ideal state was grounded in an image of marriage and the relationship between man and woman, poetry, its content, and its composers were of national significance. Changing Contexts Although it hardly needs to be said, the material circumstances in which poetry was composed and read in the eighteenth century were so different as to be alien to us today. Even pronunciation has changed, and lines that seem gratingly inept would have rhymed and scanned in their day. For instance, er was often pronounced ar, and supreme rhymed with fame; words borrowed from French retained more of the French pronunciation. ‘‘Taste,’’ which often seems bewildering or astonishing, helped dictate both the ‘‘purposes’’ of poetry and its aesthetic ‘‘standards.’’ Critics deplore the rage for Pindarics and later for Shenstone that seduced poets and ‘‘ruined’’ their promise, but at the height of each imitative craze people believed important and beautiful elements were being added to British verse. We may never fully understand why Frances Greville’s Prayer for Indifference (1759), an excellent poem that Lonsdale identifies as ‘‘the most celebrated poem by a woman in the period,’’ was so overwhelmingly popular ,∂ but we can come to understand the way a genre functions in a culture in numerous, important, revisionary ways. Introduction 3 Above all, poetry in the eighteenth century was written for more reasons than we can imagine. Much of it was written without high literary ambitions, and its purposes would render the use of the codes of prestige poetry ridiculous. In the first half of the century both men and women came to be expected to...