Women’s Poetry, 2011

A major achievement for the study of Victorian women’s poetry is undoubtedly Mary Ellis Gibson’s extraordinary Indian Angles: English Verse in Colonial India from Jones to Tagore (Athens: Ohio Univ. Press, 2011) and the companion Anglophone Poetry in Colonial India, 1780–1913: A Critical Anthology (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2011). While neither the monograph nor the anthology focus exclusively on women poets, both have important, and impeccably researched material, on women’s contribution to Anglophone poetry in the era, and the relations among colonialism, gender, and literary tradition in a colonial context. In particular, the book’s argument puts women’s poetry at the centre of Anglophone poetry, in a deep conversation with a wide group of poets and three structuring concerns: “the material histories of uneven development; the geocultural history of the transperipheral; and the psychic history of what Homi Bhabha calls ‘unhomlieness’” (p. 7; the reference is to Bhabha’s The Location of Culture). In its rich, meticulously researched, and elegantly argued chapters distinguished by powerful close literary readings, Gibson puts poetry and the culture of poetry at the heart of English language culture in India. The main thrust of this argument is the print culture of India, and its relationship to Britain and to Europe in general, in terms of the colonial publication and circulation of newspapers, annuals, miscellanies, and belletristic volumes.

Within this wide historical tracing of print media, Gibson’s book always comes back to the importance of literary codes, conventions, and genres, arguing overall that “poetry can be thought of as a kind of pressure cooker for historical and ideological contradictions. . . . The pressure of poetic convention makes especially evident the rifts and fissures within the colonial scene of writing” (p. 8). Part of the methodology that is particularly effective here is the teasing out of the significance of the “extraordinary number of para-texts” in Indian poetry in English, through the assumption that legibility is fundamental and yet problematic for these writers (p. 9). Although capacious in approach, and generous in its discussion of a huge number of poets, Indian Angles has a largely Bengali focus, and the introduction defends the decision through reminding us of the centrality of Calcutta to the publishing and reception of English language poetry in colonial India, thanks to the English administration that had its major center there (pp. 9–10).

Each chapter of Indian Angles puts a woman writer in dialogue with men poets and with the culture of Anglophone poetry in India. In chapter one, the poetry of Anna Maria (about whom little is known), is placed in relation to late eighteenth-century Della Cruscan poets in London as well as the dynamic between center and periphery. The discussion compares her to Sir John Horsford and Sir William Jones, who originated English language poetry in India, and their different negotiations with both the metropole and poetic tradition. The following chapter on bardic nationalism features the English journalist Emma Roberts, colleague of Letitia Elizabeth Landon, whom she influenced through her representation of orientalism. Roberts is also placed within her friendship with the East Indian writer H. L. V. Derozio. Chapter four concerns in more detail the mimicry of poetic conventions embedded in colonial poetics, clustering together Kasiprasad Ghosh, Michael Madhusudan Dutt, and Mary Seyers Carshore (a woman writer of Irish parents who lived all her life in India, dying in the 1857 uprising). Europhile and Christian convert Toru Dutt, already emerging in nineteenth-century studies as a major poet, is in the next chapter put into dialogue with Mary Eliza Leslie, through the ideologies of religion and domesticity. Moving into the concerns of early modernism, especially late-century cosmopolitanism, aestheticism, and empire, Gibson juxtaposes the poetry of Sarojini Naidu with her British friend Arthur Symons, as part of a chapter that also pairs Manmohan Ghose and Laurence Binyon, and Rabindranath Tagore and William Rothenstein, Yeats and Pound. Indian Angles is a brilliant book, conceptually sophisticated, meticulously researched, always with an ear for the alluring complexities of colonial poetics, tightly focused on pairs and groups of poets yet also ranging widely within European and Indian poets and...