Networking the Nation: British and American Women’s Poetry and Italy, 1840–1870 by Alison Chapman (review)

In an 1850 letter, Elizabeth Barrett Browning remarked to her sister Arabella that the poet Eliza Ogilvy, who like Barrett Browning resided in Florence, was only so winsome: she “is wanting somehow the last touch of softness & exterior sensibility—I like her much … yet I dont [sic] love her” (152). Barrett Browning ostensibly assesses a person, but underlying her complaint are considerations in poetics, as Alison Chapman persuasively shows. To Barrett Browning, Ogilvy unsatisfactorily embodies the “English Poetess,” an identity that each of the key expatriate poets in Chapman’s remarkable book, Networking the Nation: British and American Women’s Poetry and Italy, 1840–1870, remakes with ambition and with some trepidation. A strength of this outstanding study of women’s poetic networks in Italy lies in Chapman’s talent for illuminating the crucial intertwinements that poetic identity has with quotidian experience. In exploring the figures of Ogilvy, Barrett Browning, Theodosia Garrow Trollope, and Isa Blagden, this deeply researched book offers important new insights into the internationalism and political commitment central to Victorian women’s reformulation of feminine poetics. Chapman’s smart and meticulous readings of poems, letters, life-writing, and news accounts, and her imaginative attention to the spatial realities of nineteenth-century Florence, reveal in precise and compelling ways how expatriatism contributed to transformations in women’s poetry that still resonate today.

Network theory, particularly Bruno Latour’s concept of dynamic social networks, is important to Chapman’s argument, as are accounts of feminine and writerly spaces by such theorists as Shirley Ardener and Diana Fuss. Her book’s first part explores the townscapes of nineteenth-century Florence and the distinctive identities of three expatriate salons. We learn about the neighborhood of Bellosguardo, a “liminal, transgressive, and transformative” place with captivating views that became a center for Anglophone expatriates who discussed the politics of Italian nationhood and experimented with spiritualism (23). Meetings were “not merely social, but deeply textual” in the salons that Chapman takes up in turn: Blagden’s Villa Brichieri, Garrow Trollope’s Villino Trollope, and Barrett Browning’s Casa Guidi (42). Each had a distinctive identity. Blagden affiliated with Florence’s lesbian community, and her home was “coded principally as a feminine space for both poetry and spiritualism” (32). In her salon that “acted as a crucial conduit between nationalities and Italian patriots,” Garrow Trollope practiced a subtle detachment, sketching guests with a sometimes biting wit (49). Chapman’s scrutiny of the floorplan of Casa Guidi reveals that Barrett Browning’s writing quarters in the drawing room, unlike those of her husband, sat amidst social spaces, and thus how “the fantasy of absolute domestic privacy in EBB’s correspondence” eluded her (70).

After a study of expatriate poetics in Aurora Leigh (1856), the book’s second section considers Garrow Trollope, Blagden, and Ogilvy. Chapman crafts a professional biography of each woman, with excellent interpretation of poems and persuasive accounts of intertextuality that reveal the ways in which these writers responded to one another, to Romantic predecessors, including Percy Bysshe Shelley and John Keats, and to events in Italian politics. Ogilvy’s “investment in a political poetics,” for example, intensified over time (153). While her family and Barrett Browning’s enjoyed “daily contact … based on both poetry and childcare,” Ogilvy saw Barrett Browning’s poems as “elitist,” while Barrett Browning disapproved of Ogilvy’s investment in a “myth-making” that she believed nurtured Italian passivity (155, 156). In support of Italian nationhood, they developed dueling aesthetics.

Amidst Chapman’s attention to the concerns of women poets, two stand out particularly: the problem of the home—of domesticity—and the problem of periodical publication. As Chapman rightly argues, these issues were different for Victorian women poets than for men, because in each case women negotiated a particularly heavy burden of expectation. Problems remained to be solved. While the poetry of a key...