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Reviewed by:
  • Antologia delle poetesse romantiche inglesi
  • Michael Rossington
Lilla Maria Crisafulli (ed.), Antologia delle poetesse romantiche inglesi (2 vols, Roma: Carocci, 2003), pp. 1201. €40 paperback. 88 430 2380 2.

In the decade following the publication of Roger Lonsdale's pioneering Eighteenth-Century Women Poets. An Oxford Anthology in 1989, several annotated anthologies of poetry by women writing in Britain in the Romantic period appeared in paperback aimed primarily at audiences in Britain and North America. These included the selections edited by Jennifer Breen (1992), Andrew Ashfield (1995), and Duncan Wu (1997). In addition, as well as criticism and contextual work about these poets, the 1990s saw the beginning of the serious scholarly editing of single-author selections, published mainly in North America, led by Stuart Curran's edition of Charlotte Smith (1993), William McCarthy and Elizabeth Kraft's of Anna Laetitia Barbauld (1994), and Jerome J. McGann and Daniel Riess's of Letitia Elizabeth Landon (1997). However, in her introduction to the volumes under review, the editor, Lilla Maria Crisafulli, comments that the lack of available translations of their works in Italy up until now has been an obstacle to knowledge of poetry by British women in the Romantic period there ('In Italia … la scarsità o l'incompletezza delle traduzioni dei testi delle poetesse romantiche inglesi hanno impeditoche se ne conoscessero esistenza e qualità'). But it is important to note immediately that this anthology, published in Rome in paperback at a notably reasonable price, is not simply an after-effect of the wave of marketable scholarly interest in these writers in the English-speaking world over the past fifteen years or so. First, Antologia delle poetesse romantiche inglesi is in a tradition of scholarship about Romantic-period writing in English by women evident in conferences and publications initiated by the Centro Interdisciplinare di Studi Romantici dell'Università di Bologna over many years, a related recent product being a volume of essays edited by Lilla Maria Crisafulli and Cecilia Pietropoli, Le poetesse romantiche inglesi. Tra identità e genere (2002). Secondly, at over twelve-hundred pages, this is probably the fullest paperback anthology of poetryby women of the Romantic period yet available. Moreover it deserves serious attention as one of the very best.

The two volumes, containing the work of thirty-one poets born between the middle of the eighteenth and the early nineteenth centuries, have been assembled by a team of editors and translators. Crisafulli is surely right to feel satisfied at having been able to produce such a generous selection for the intended readership ('la mia soddisfazione per aver potuto presentare al pubblico italiano in una forma così ampia la produzione poetica delle poetesse romantiche inglesi'). The poetry is presented in customary parallel-text format, by poet, and in chronological order by date of birth, starting with Anna Seward (1742–1809) and ending with Mary Browne (1812–1844). All that one would expect to be in such an anthology is represented, but of particular interest is the inclusion of poems that have been hitherto relatively unanthologized. For example, Mary Hays's intriguingly reflective, and painfully conflicted, 'Be Mine (Sonnet XX)' ('Sii mia (Sonetto XX)') which ends: 'Ah then! The struggling passions to allay, / Be mine – the social sympathizing friend' ('ah, allora! A placare le ruggenti passioni, / sii mia, sincera amica, e con me simpatizza', trans. Cecilia Pietropoli). Also to be found is Mary Bryan's poem about war, published [End Page 84] in 1815, 'On Seeing the Representation of a Victory' ('Nel vedere la raffigurazione di una vittoria'), that ends up as far away as is imaginable from William Wordsworth's grim 'Carnage is thy daughter' in his 'Ode 1815' (1816): 'Thou God of Mercy, I will look no more/ Lest seeing thee not here, I should forget / My God!' ('Tu, Dio di pietà, toglierò lo sguardo / nel timore che, non vedendoti qui, io dimentichi / il mio Dio!', trans. Silvia Bordoni and Annamaria Preti). Several longer texts, such as Barbauld's Eighteen Hundred and Eleven, A Poem (1812) are, gratifyingly, represented in full. But some others, such as Smith's The Emigrants (1793), Mary Tighe's 'Psyche; or, The Legend of Love' (1811), and Hemans's 'The Restoration...

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