Victorian Women Poets (review)

The present volume is the most recent of a number of books to come out with this title since 1992, including anthologies, book-length studies, and collections of scholarly essays. Following in the mold of these books, Alison Chapman's volume aims to bring new insight to both canonical and recently recovered poets. The excellent essays in this collection explore the ways in which writers participated in and shaped the literary marketplace, engaged with transatlantic and transnational literature and politics, and argued fiercely for social justice. This book distinguishes itself from its predecessors by stressing the breadth of contexts for these poets' work.

This emphasis is not drawn out in the introduction, which instead casts the book as a contribution to the ongoing effort to recuperate women writers, insisting that the "work of uncovering women's poetry is by no means completed" (1). While Chapman is certainly right to point out that we still need complete editions of many of the poets' work, and that certain groups, such as working-class women poets and colonial and commonwealth poets, suffer from a lack of attention, she neglects to say why we should recover these poets, how we should approach their work, or how we might define them as a group. Several of the essays in this collection do a better job of exploring these questions. Indeed, Chapman's own article suggests that the poetess is not a paragon of English domesticity but an inherently transnational figure. Joseph Bristow, himself an editor of a collection of essays entitled Victorian Women Poets (1995), declares that we need to "justify why we might lend value to their writings beyond the plain fact that they happen, in all their diversity, to exist" (167) and then goes on to propose that we might do so by considering how particular audiences and publications have valued these poets. Here, he argues that Harper's valued the "transatlantic spirit" of Margaret Veley, a London poet whose democratic poetry appealed to Harper's liberalism. Contending that the process of recovery recapitulates the old-fashioned methodology of canon-formation, Natalie Houston suggests in her essay on the fin-de-siècle sonnet that we sidestep the author- centric approach of canon formation and re-formation by focusing on genre. Moreover, Houston challenges the very premise of the book when she asserts that in their use of the sonnet as a meditative and descriptive form, male and female sonneteers of the period did not use the form differently according to gender.

Several articles contextualize women poets by considering their place in periodicals, from early Victorian annuals to the late-century Harper's; together they demonstrate the evolution of periodical publishing for women over the course of the century. Recognizing that annual books increased women poets' audiences and incomes, Patricia Pulham argues that the annuals did a disservice to their contributors by pairing poems with engravings of women, which established a merger between the categories of woman and poet, in a process that both eroticizes and fragments the merged figure. Marjorie Stone disparages critics' confusion of the poem and the poet in biographical readings of "The Runaway Slave at Pilgrim's Point" (1848). In her powerful and thoroughly researched article, she investigates how Elizabeth Barrett Browning creatively adapted conventions in the Liberty Bell, where the poem was first published, in order to intervene in abolitionist debates in that journal. The "disturbing" erotics that Pulham argues dominated the annuals no longer seem to be problematic for Barrett Browning, nor for Veley; the periodicals that published them did so to underscore their own progressive political positions.

Five of the eight essays in this collection emphasize women poets' engagement in progressive politics, including Stone's attention to Barrett Browning's abolitionist poetry, Bristow's illumination of Veley's liberal, democratic poetry, and Chapman's discussion of poets' commitment to the Risorgimento. Glennis Byron argues that whereas male poets of the period took a primarily psychological approach to the...