Guide to the Year's Work: General Materials

Once again this year many of the best new general studies of Victorian poetry and culture focus on the long neglected contributions of women writers and of women's perspectives. Women's Poetry, Late Romantic to Late Victorian: Gender and Genre, 1830-1900, edited by Isobel Armstrong and Virginia Blain, consists of eighteen essays collected mainly from the 1995 conference "Rethinking Women's Poetry 1730-1930" held at Birkbeck College. In addition to the editors, the impressive list of contributors includes Cheryl Walker, Yopie Prins, Linda Peterson, Meenakshi Mukherjee, Edward Marx, Tricia Lootens, Kathleen Hickok, and other prominent scholars, and covers a range of topics including the marketing of poetry by women, lesbian poetics, colonial poetics and national identity, poetic uses of devotional, patriotic, and scientific discourses, and recovery of such forgotten or neglected poets as Adelaide Proctor, Emily Pfeiffer, Olive Custance, Laurence Hope, Margaret Veley, Toru Dutt, Sarojini Naidu, and the American poets Lydia Sigourney and Frances Harper as well as readings of such better known poets as Amy Levy, Michael Field, and Dora Greenwell and of the now firmly canonical Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Christina Rossetti. The highlights of the collection, I think, are the essays by the editors, especially Armstrong's introductory essay "Msrepresentation: Codes of Affect and Politics in Nineteenth-Century Women's Poetry," which compellingly argues that the sentimentality and lachrymose melancholy of much women's poetry is well worth recovery after having been purged by the "cruel policing of affect" that was part of a "Whig Aesthetic" and its "genealogy of nineteenth-century women's poetry as a progressive move toward modernism" (pp. 4-5). Rather than leaving behind this body of poetry as the faltering first steps toward genuine literary accomplishment, Armstrong argues, we need to inquire into "the possibilities of that culture of affect, and the genres and linguistic forms it engendered, the possibility that 'slush' might possess some epistemic potential" and might even enrich "the impoverished terms of our own century for feeling and emotion" (p. 3). Armstrong's project, and the project of the whole collection, is not only to recover a few neglected poets, but also to revalue a whole discredited cultural mode and an "ideology of feeling" (p. 3) that has had, and may still have, political power and value. The politics of the female culture of affect are analyzed in Armstrong's essay and also, most obviously, in three essays (Mukherjee, Marx, Lootens) gathered under the common heading "Colonial Poetics, National Identity," and in the three gathered under the title "Lesbian Poetics." Heading this latter section, Virginia Blain's "Sexual Politics of the Victorian Closet" persuasively argues that the historical tendency to dismiss women's poetry as sentimental and masochistic ought to be reversed by viewing the poetry not as repellently sentimental but as intriguingly perverse. Defining lesbian poetry broadly as poetry authorizing sexual autonomy, Blain establishes her case with intriguing discussions of Michael Field and Olive Custance, and especially with a superb reading of Margaret Veley's "A Japanese Fan." The other two essays in this section, on Michael Field by Robert Fletcher and on Amy Levy by Emma Francis, both sustain and complicate the argument about the intriguing perversity of these very accomplished poets. Finally, the volume as a whole demonstrates how far recovery of Victorian women's poetry has come, both by its confident assumptions about the value of such poets as Levy, Field, Greenwell, Webster and others, and by its convincing demonstration of the value of the whole culture of affect informing the accomplishments of Victorian women writers.

With its friendly, unthreatening title, The Cambridge Companion to Victorian Poetry, edited by Joseph Bristow, might be expected to provide a guide to received ideas about Victorian poetry for the general reader, but instead it promises "some of the most exciting critical developments in an area of inquiry that has undergone remarkable changes during the past 20 years" (p. xv). Rather than offering user-friendly...