"She Follows Them How Else? By Flying"

Jane Dowson and Alice Entwistle's A History of Twentieth-Century British Women's Poetry attempts a daunting task: a comprehensive survey of an entire century of poetic production. The two restrictions placed on this endeavor—the writers discussed must be women, and they must be associated with the United Kingdom or the Republic of Ireland—hardly render it less quixotic. The number of figures and texts involved make it difficult to arrive at or defend generalizations about the material. No matter what one might say, there will almost inevitably be exceptions. Moreover, one almost inevitably does violence to the subject matter itself. While social scientists might be comfortable working with large data sets, they also tend to speak in terms of anonymous statistical aggregates. The best poetry, though, is valuable not because it is representative but because it is singular. After encountering such strikingly complex lyrics as Patience Agbabi's "UFO WOMAN (PRONOUNCED OOFOE)" (2000), Medbh McGuckian's "The Flitting" (1979), and Rosemary Tonks's "The Sofas, Fogs and Cinemas" (1963), how can a responsible critic turn around and speak about them tersely and reductively, as examples of this or that idea or tendency, without feeling a twinge of guilt?

Dowson and Entwistle proceed by dividing the twentieth century into three slices of time—1900–1945, 1945–1980, and 1980–2000—that correspond roughly both to conventional divisions within British literary history ("modernism, the postwar Movement and postmodernism") and to the "three so-called waves of the women's movement (suffragism, Women's Liberation and 'power' feminism)" (5). Each section is further subdivided into an overview followed by four chapters that concentrate on particular themes, genres, and figures. The mid century, for example, is represented by chapters on Stevie Smith, on "the paradox of home," on "the poetry of consciousness-raising," and on the neo-avant-garde Cambridge school of poetry. Throughout, Dowson and Entwistle combine several complementary approaches to their subject: surveys of poets and styles characteristic of a period; commentary on sociopolitical and disciplinary contexts; and close analysis of exceptional figures such as Edith Sitwell, Jackie Kay, and Carol Ann Duffy. As a result, the book manages to balance careful attention to textual specifics with more wide-ranging literary-historical speculation.

On a number of counts, A History of Twentieth-Century British Women's Poetry succeeds admirably. Dowson and Entwistle seem to have spent a prodigious amount of time calling up book after book from the dusty depths of the British Library. Their lists of female poets (who won which awards during what decade, who used a particular literary device when, and so forth) tend to be positively biblical in length. Their bibliography, for instance, names every book of verse published between 1900 and 2000 by over two hundred women writers. (It takes up forty-three pages.) Dowson and Entwistle also seem to have read every last one of these books, as well as every ancillary or related text that they have been able to track down. Their discussions of individual poets draw on an array of primary sources, among them newspapers, prefaces, diaries, lectures, personal correspondence, and unpublished manuscripts. At times one almost gasps at the extent of their knowledge. During their review of Elizabeth Daryush's career, for example, they choose to highlight not only "Still Life," a poem that the influential critic Donald Davie once singled out for praise, but also "Off Duty," an utterly obscure lyric written from a nurse's point of view that was "not included in [Daryush's] Selected or Collected Poems" (41). Their synoptic command of facts, dates, and details ensures that their occasional sweeping claims—such as the assertion that female modernists are especially drawn to dramatic monologues (chapter 4), or their statement that contemporary poets have a penchant for retelling classical myths involving metamorphosis (chapter 11)—possess real weight and force. A reader trusts that they are neither erroneously extrapolating from the existing canon nor...