Portrait of the Female Artist as a Young Robin: Maria Edgeworth's Telltale Tailpiece

“A Robin Red breast in a cage / Puts all Heaven in a Rage.”

William Blake (“Auguries of Innocence,” Portable Blake 150)

“I have you in my power. Oh! The joy of having a good story, and a good secret to tell.”

Maria Edgeworth (Rosamond 146)²

It is a truism universally acknowledged that writing women seldom make women writers their heroines, even in adult fictions of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. There’s the occasional protagonist who does novelize professionally, but then her creator, Lady Morgan (Sydney Owenson), was thought a brazen hussy with a penchant for display, an exception that proves the rule. Still less do juvenile stories feature fictionalizing protagonists; even in twentieth-century children’s books, female artists as heroines are rather rare; Louise Fitzhugh’s Harriet, Lucy Maud Montgomery’s Emily, and a handful more. In earlier tales, they’re thin on the ground indeed and perhaps emblematically relegated, like Louisa May Alcott’s Jo, to attic composing and rat audiences. However, it may be that we’re just not recognizing female artists and fictionalizing heroines because they often assume tails to tell their tales. Although tailpieces are conventionally the artist’s coda, the miniature decorative flourish that closes the page or text, they’re also useful shorthand for those signature pieces that launch writing careers and appropriate animal genres for women’s cultural practices and literary representations. Like those of many eighteenth-century engravers, Georgian women’s telltale tailpieces of child and creature interplay are genre scenes that capture characteristic actions to miniaturize a world view. In the art historian’s parlance, they often, quite literally, constitute “conversation pieces,” domestic groups that verbally represent what these small-scale family portraits visually show: a collaborative fictional space shaped by relationship and dialogue. The animal tailpiece or family conversation piece, I will argue, embodies an alternative aesthetics that calls into question conventional assumptions about “Romantic” childhood, historical juvenile genres, and the dialectic between the so-called “public” and “private” spheres.

Most historians and literary critics who consider culture’s increasing symbolic investment in the natural and animal worlds from the Enlightenment on direct their attention to men: the scientists who pillage Mother Nature for the social good, the masculinist Romantics (and their modern heirs) who colonize her and co-opt her creatures in the service of their self-aggrandizing poetry. Alike empowered by the adult white male gaze, they trope their conquest over nature in large-scale endeavors and topographies of the self that occupy the whole landscape. They identify with sublime mountains and soaring skylarks, the transcendent and the visionary. Until quite recently, women writers concerned with issues of representing nature or with the place of animals in relation to questions of human subjectivity got short shrift. Now we’re learning that Georgian women authors inhabit different scenes of writing and different geographies of creativity: local, social, collaborative, familial. Their gendered aesthetics eschews solitary genius for the crowded salon, the family sitting room, and the garden stoop; they don’t run with wolves, but hop about with robins. When female poets got control of aesthetic environments and practices in the 1820s, a recent critic argues, English verse was placed under “house arrest,” enclosed and domesticated. ³ Although Romantic authorship certainly needs more than a few good men, why must the desegregated poetic corps sometimes come across as, well, boring? And if the wild boy child who prowls the Romantic natural world is joined by the good girl in the back yard, is it still “Romanticism” as we’ve always known it? Does it remain the same literary body when so many cells are new? What happens to the select Romantic canon and its characteristic discourse when we factor in women’s writing and children’s literature? If we displace Romanticism construed as adult and additive (as in “Romanticism and . . .”), then how can children’s cultural studies help us reconceptualize literary history and periodization? Perhaps we might eventually think of storying about, for, and as children in the Derridean sense of a “dangerous” supplement, the something...