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

Poetic Sisters: Early Eighteenth-Century Women Poets asks for a reevaluation of women’s literary networks, which, in its most basic definition, studies the relationships between women writers and how they accessed one another’s written work. Deborah Kennedy invites a new generation of scholarship on women’s literary networks through an intense focus on the interpersonal and literary connections among five early eighteenth-century English poets: Anne Finch, Elizabeth Rowe, Frances Seymour, Sarah Dixon, and Mary Jones. The purpose of this book is to reevaluate the term sisterhood and present an important female literary network that reveals the bonds of a united profession that connects these writers. Through Kennedy’s exploration of multiple perspectives that inform the burgeoning study of women’s literary networks, Poetic Sisters works to show the development of these writers’ literary legacies from the eighteenth century to the twenty-first century in an effort to present the writers to a new generation of readers.

Kennedy’s study expounds upon conceptions of “sisterhood” and women’s collaboration as previously put in place by Rachel Crawford’s essay “The Structure of the Sororal in Wordsworth’s ‘Nutting’” (1992), Janet Todd’s Daughters of Ireland (2004), Jennie Batchelor’s Women’s Work: Labour, Gender, Authorship, 1750–1830 (2010), Amy Culley’s British Women’s Life Writing, 1760–1840 (2014), and many others. The collection of scholarship on women’s collaboration, women’s literary networks, and conceptions of sisterhood is one that has grown significantly over the past two decades, and Kennedy asks us to pause and reevaluate the ways in which “sisterhood” operates in eighteenth-century literature. Important to the canon of scholarship on “sisterhood” in its many forms, the focus of Poetic Sisters is an area of eighteenth-century women’s writing that complicates our use of “sisterhood”—or even the “sororal” as laid out by Crawford—and further develops the discussion of women’s networks to include writers that have been previously omitted from this conversation.

The first three chapters, “Introducing the Poetic Sisters,” “‘She Triumphs with a Song’: The Poetry of Anne Finch, Countess of Winchilsea,” and “Singing Her Heart Out: Elizabeth Rowe,” provide a working definition of poetic “sisterhood”––most simply, “in the literary sense, poetic sisters are related not by blood, but by ink. It is their devotion to their craft, to the muses, that unites them” (2). In order to establish why the connections between women writers are important to new generations of readers and critics, Kennedy argues that these writers have the ability to transcend the divide between academics and popular readership by “demonstrating their unique contributions to the tradition of women’s writing and by recovering the full range of their diverse voices and subjects” (18). Indeed, chapter 2 offers a comprehensive look at Finch’s writing to promote the view of her as one who is the foundation for this particular women’s literary network as, “she was an earnest poet who was gifted with wit, and like the best writers of her day, she had ‘a quick eye and a ready tongue’” (58). Finch’s domestic poetry serves as the cornerstone for Kennedy’s book, but Elizabeth Rowe achieved international fame for her religious poetry. Rowe’s emphasis upon morality and religion bolstered her fame, the discussion of which leads nicely to the second chapter’s comprehensive look at Finch’s poetry.

What is perhaps the most refreshing about Poetic Sisters is the seeming ease with which Kennedy is able to draw a clear map of the terrain of early eighteenth-century women’s poetry. Kennedy presents two sides of stardom for women poets in the eighteenth century: international and national. Finch and Rowe appeal to these audiences differently, but continue to feed this literary network through their shared friends and readers. In the fourth chapter, “The Countess of Hertford and the Poetry of the English Landscape,” Kennedy offers a helpful review of the poetic trends, an investment in the religious and...