A History of Twentieth-Century British Women's Poetry (review)

This expansive and generous survey, remarkably one of the first of its kind, attempts to sketch out a historical lineage of twentieth-century British women's poetry. Split into three chronological sections, Dowson and Entwistle provide summative overviews of each period alongside critical analysis of key writers and their shared thematic concerns. A study that finds room for writers as disparate as Vita Sackville-West and Jackie Kay runs the risk of reductive treatments, but Dowson and Entwistle's groupings are suggestive rather than constricting. Stevie Smith, an often marginalized figure who fights shy of canons, is here used as a pivot between two strands of post-war British women's poetry, providing illuminating contexts for writers such as Patricia Beer and Jeni Couzyn. Meanwhile, the ever-popular Carol Ann Duffy is discussed alongside dialogic trends in the works of Caribbean poets such as Valerie Bloom and Grace Nichols. Dowson and Entwistle's canon-forming is also democratic and pluralist: their summary of Second World War writing includes neglected voices such as Sheila Wingfield alongside H.D. and Edith Sitwell. They also downplay the totemic figure of Sylvia Plath, arguing that her posthumous canonization has obscured the work of many equally deserving names.

This is a commendable book and is scrupulously researched throughout. The extensive bibliography alone will prove an invaluable resource to subsequent scholars. Dowson and Entwistle are also particularly successful in tracing the changing vicissitudes of British poetry publishing throughout the century. By tracking the representation of various writers in anthologies of the period, they give a detailed impression of how their work was being disseminated and read. They also achieve a successful balance between being comprehensive and exhaustive. Chapters focusing on the use of dramatic monologue, the idea of home, or the importance of science and myth in twentieth-century British women's poetry usefully offset the more linear and dense survey accounts of the literary scene.

The vast scope of the book means that the poetic analysis occasionally seems cryptically abrupt rather than concise. The brief quotations from lesser-known poets often provide useful thematic links at the expense of the individual voice, particularly in the case of Edwardian and Georgian poets such as Margaret Sackville and S. Gertrude Ford. Perhaps the always difficult project of creating historical literary narratives is made more so when dealing with British women poets, many of whom, as Dowson and Entwistle argue, are profoundly concerned with questions of lineage and inheritance. Consequently, many of their assessments find these writers equivocal and ambivalent, engaging in a male-dominated literary culture with a mixture of scepticism, complicity, and reticence. As they conclude of Rosemary Tonks' work, "much is left unsaid" (p. 156).

Yet if this statement might equally be applied to the study of British women's poetry itself, this book is an excellent starting point, an invaluable reference work that points the way forward to a new configuration of twentieth-century British women's poetry. Hopefully it will stimulate and provoke not only the next generation of critics, but of women poets.