Femmes poètes du XIXe siècle: Une Anthologie (review)

The renaissance in the study of nineteenth-century women's literature has sometimes been hindered by the unavailability of texts-especially in poetry, where many books are out of print. Addressing the lack of source texts, Femmes poètes du XIX^e Siècle brings together some of the best-known nineteenth-century French women poets: Marceline Debordes-Valmore, Victoire Babois, Louise Colet, Renée Vivien, Amable Tastu, Gérard d'Houville, and Anna de Noailles. It also includes lesser-known ones like Malvina Blanchecotte and recent rediscoveries like Marie Krynsinska. Together, these women participated in almost every major poetic movement of the nineteenth century. The experiment of placing dissimilar poets side by side is a fruitful one, potentially as transformative as Domna Stanton's 1986 volume French Feminist Poems from the Middle Ages to the Present in the Defiant Muse series and Norman Shapiro's 2008 anthology French Women Poets of Nine Centuries.

Paradoxically, the editor takes the position that there is no such thing as a "poésie féminine" (13). The raison d'être of this anthology is "pour pouvoir juger de la production poétique des femmes, pour discuter de sa qualité, de son unité, de son éventuelle et problématique féminité" (14); it assembles dissimilar literary artifacts and allows the reader to judge their points of contact. As the editor's excellent introduction and the substantive critical essays establish, many of the poems would be perfectly at home in another anthology-the regular verse of Constance de Salm in an anthology of neoclassical poetry, Malvina Blanchecotte and Louise Michel in a survey of worker or provincial poets; Delphine Gay, Marceline Debordes-Valmore, or Anna de Noailles in a collection of Romantic verse. But by assembling these women poets in a single volume, this anthology succeeds in challenging the assumption that all women wrote more or less the same classical elegiac verse.

Christine Planté's collection excels in breadth rather than depth. It is a survey of short lyrical works and passages from longer works which ably demonstrates the range of nineteenth-century poetry by women, as well as the scope of individual œuvres. By juxtaposing so many short poems, the anthology uncovers the particularities of poetic development common to women: for example, the long commitment of women poets to Romanticism and their relative absence from the Symbolist school (Marie Krynsinska was the one bona fide female member). As the final section "Sapho fin de siècle" makes evident, women poets like Gérard d'Houville and Anna de Noailles were, by and large, writing verse closer in style to Lamartine and Vigny than to Mallarmé or Valéry. Produced by more than a dozen scholars from CNRS-Lyon and beyond, this second edition makes minor corrections and adds critical materials to the first edition. The critical materials, bibliographies, and biographical information are of impressive quality and undeniable scholarly importance. The poetry is reproduced with great accuracy and the biographical notes by specialists in the field are responsive to the needs of a more general readership, as well as experts. Unfortunately, some of the secondary materials in this edition, especially the concluding essays, are marred by typographical errors, but these faults do not interfere with reading. The book doubles as a reference work, containing an extensive list of major female poets at the end of the volume, as well as cataloguing older anthologies of women poets.

This anthology will make a wonderful addition to any collection of French-language books; even specialists are likely to discover unknown poems in this incredibly diverse collection. It should be required reading for all specialists of nineteenth-century French literature, especially poetry specialists, for whom it may well prove a catalyst for future projects.