The Romance of the Lyric in Nineteenth-Century Women’s Poetry: Experiments in Form by Lee Christine O’Brien (review)

The term “romance” in the title The Romance of the Lyric in Nineteenth-Century Women’s Poetry: Experiments in Form foreshadows the duality of Lee Christine O’Brien’s text. The text is an expression of love—O’Brien’s love for language and for poetic form—and, as the term suggests, the book draws heavily on romance traditions and on Romantic poetic influences on Victorian women poets who were also keenly interested in language and form. In scope, the text is ambitious, spanning a hundred years bracketed by Mary Tighe and Rosamund Marriott Watson, with close readings of seminal works by these and other women writers to demonstrate the historical connection between myth, folklore, and lyric poetic forms during the long nineteenth century. In addition, O’Brien brings together disparate threads to demonstrate the importance of the concept of “other”—witches and fairies, for example—to this community of women poets. All of these poetic forms and subtly nuanced romance literary traditions met, mingled, and matured, suggests O’Brien, in the domestic spaces of the nineteenth-century woman writer.

This engaging and compelling book consists of juxtapositions and contexts that are fresh and inviting. O’Brien enters into the Romantic, and specifically Shellyean, activity of disrupting what has become familiar in order to suggest new ways we might understand the complexities of gendered representations in poetry by nineteenth-century women. The challenge posed by such an expansive study is that of balancing depth and coverage with analysis specific enough to reveal the existence of a continued poetic discourse. O’Brien achieves coherence in this respect by introducing a term of her own, the “romance lyric,” which she uses to describe what she calls “the intertextual functioning of romance” (pp. xiii, xiv). Through deliberate parody of romance forms such as myth and folklore, she suggests, nineteenth-century women poets developed increasingly complex ways in which the domestic space became a gendered literary marketplace, subtly reflecting and promoting changes in the cultural positioning of the nineteenth-century woman, particularly the woman writer. O’Brien’s wide-ranging knowledge of poetic development and of the importance of folklore and myth, as well as her fruitful exploitation of intersections between poets and poems, highlight the consistent and deliberate refashioning of old forms of poetry by women in the nineteenth century.

Despite framing dates that mark off one hundred years, O’Brien organizes her discussion not chronologically, but thematically, with interrelations and connections between poets, poems, forms, and themes woven artfully to reveal a developing poetic discourse. The hybridity of form of O’Brien’s romance lyric characterizes the nature of her argument that poetry by nineteenth-century women consistently pressed the limits of convention in the relationship between form and theme. This idea is not in itself new and has been the foundation of contemporary critical studies of a number of nineteenth-century women poets; however, O’Brien’s treatment of parody as “repetition with difference” reveals a fascinating development in poetic form related to gender and genre (p. 13). For example, having demonstrated in the third chapter through pairing Walter Scott and Marriott Watson that the romance lyric is a transformation of the romantic ballad, O’Brien lays the foundation for her convincing argument in the fourth chapter that the fairy world of Marriott Watson’s “Märchen” (1889), with its roots in the ballad and reliance on the uncanny, actually reflects social reality. In the sixth chapter, she contends that Watson’s The Art of the House (1897) should be read not only in terms of the female aesthetic but also in terms of the social and political reality of male privilege. In like manner, Tighe’s Psyche; or, the Legend of Love (1805) in the fifth chapter provides the basis for discussions of allegory in subsequent chapters, not only...