Poetic Sisters: Early Eighteenth-Century Women Poets by Deborah Kennedy (review)

Deborah Kennedy’s Poetic Sisters: Eighteenth-Century Women Poets is a beautiful, vital book—the sort that one borrows repeatedly from the library before finally buying. Kennedy elegantly traces out the personal and professional connections among five eighteenth-century poets: Anne Finch, Countess of Winchilsea; Elizabeth Singer Rowe; Frances Seymour, Countess of Hertford; Sarah Dixon; and Mary Jones. Not limited by a chronological review of the poets’ work, Kennedy seamlessly moves from subject to subject, theme to theme, biographical fact to historical context in her detailed, supple investigations of the poets’ work, lives, and significance. An opening chapter introduces the notion of “poetic sisters” and lays out the critical methodology and assumptions that underpin her study while the final chapter, “Sisterly Muses,” introduces the afterlives and potential futures of the poets.

Poetic Sisters is designed with three goals in mind. The first is perhaps the standard aim of a scholarly study of this nature: “to provide a thorough examination of [the five poets’] work, highlight the subjects about which they wrote, identify their networks of support, and explain in what ways they excelled as poets and why they are worth reading today” (p. 1). The second is to “demonstrate the development of the respectable status and self-definition of the female poet from 1700 to 1750,” offering a narrative not just for the emergence of the public female poet but also for the cultural understanding of such a being (p. 15). The third goal—“to find new readers for all five of the poets discussed by demonstrating their unique contributions to the tradition of women’s writing and by recovering the full range of their diverse voices and subjects”—seems the most radical in the current critical climate, which is once again excluding women and departing from historically engaged work (p. 18). Kennedy’s work provides a resounding riposte by demonstrating the value of historically based study and the ways that canonization adversely affects women writers.

Kennedy’s first goal in effect is to expand the contents of courses and the subjects of scholarship. Each chapter is a masterclass in one poet’s work. Readings of poems, such as Hertford’s “The Story of Inkle and Yarico, Taken out of the Eleventh Spectator” (1726) and “An Epistle from Yarico to Inkle, after He Had Sold Her for a Slave” (1726), attend to the poet’s craft and context (pp. 98–100). Here, for example, Kennedy situates Hertford’s poems in dialogue with each other, against a famous Spectator essay, within larger religious and abolitionist movements of the time, and within Hertford’s social circle and personal belief system. While Kennedy takes the time to examine specific poems and passages, she also demonstrates recurring issues and techniques in their oeuvres, such as Finch’s acknowledgement of “the struggles and the pleasures of this world” and “her firm belief in the next” (p. 57) or Dixon’s preoccupation with Alexander Pope (pp. 158–160). Occasionally, Kennedy reprints a poem in its entirety, such as Finch’s “A Nocturnal Reverie” (1713) (pp. 54–55). Kennedy’s reading of this famous poem offers new insight, gesturing at Finch’s technique, her connections to other poets such as John Milton and George Herbert, and Finch’s own argument against the “obtrusive presence of patriarchal rules” (p. 56). It also exemplifies Kennedy’s effort to provide a resource for teaching the works of these women poets.

In some ways, the most virtuosic element of Poetic Sisters is the biographical contextualization. Kennedy plumbs the personal and social depths of each poet’s life, circle, and opportunities, uncovering the ways in which each poet was, and often knew herself to be, indebted to others in the study. She pulls a “long genealogical thread” from the fabric of eighteenth-century Kentish society, showing how Dixon was very probably connected to Finch (pp. 128–30). Elsewhere, she connects Jones to Hertford through the former’s allusions to her predecessor...