Victorian Women Poets

The last year of publications on Victorian women’s poetry attests that “women’s poetry” is no longer a mere niche category but a full, diverse, developing field of study. Books in particular, as these selections show, expand the scholarly endeavor around the “Victorian” to show that transatlantic concerns were always at the heart of the period. Christina Rossetti, Augusta Webster, and Michael Field continue to be central figures, while work that considers the publication and business of poetry remains illuminating.

Yopie Prins’s Ladies’ Greek:Victorian Translations of Tragedy (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Univ. Press, 2017) considers how a specifically women’s culture around reading, writing about, and translating Greek developed in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in England and America. Prins argues that whereas classicist men approached ancient Greek with a goal to claim mastery over the language, women’s engagement with the language involved a negative capability, an acknowledgment that certain words and ideas are untranslatable, and a confrontation with the power dynamics of translation and working with a dead language. Prins organizes her chapters around five Greek tragedies, a choice that deemphasizes a focus on individual Victorian poets in favor of a culture of Ladies’ Greek, a necessary pluralistic endeavor that spanned decades and developed over that time. Chapter 3 on Prometheus Bound begins with a long section addressing EBB’s struggles between literal and paraphrastic translation, her dissatisfaction with her 1833 translation, and her second attempt in 1850. Prins treats EBB as forming the foundation for Ladies’ Greek, by subsequently considering translations and adaptations of Prometheus by Augusta Webster, Anna Swanwick, Janet Case, and the Americans Edith Hamilton and Eva Palmer Sikelianos. This lineage not only witnesses the transition from women who were self-taught in Greek to those who were able to study it at college but also bears witness to Ladies’ Greek as a “collective performance of female classical literacy” (p. 84). As the fame of Edith Hamilton demonstrates perhaps most prominently, by advocating for classical literacy, these women position themselves also as bearers of their nations’ morals, whether looking toward political order, as Swanwick did, or to archetypes connecting Greek and American ideals of freedom, as Hamilton did. Of particular interest to scholars of women poets will also be chapter 4, which discusses A. Mary F. Robinson’s and H.D.’s translations from Euripides’s Hippolytus. Robinson learned Greek in mixed classrooms at the University College in London and developed her ideas in correspondence with J. A. Symonds and with EBB on her mind as a model. For Robinson, translating Euripides creates a space for exploring gender fluidity, desire between women, to champion the lyricism, femininity, and decadence of the Greek poet and in her own work and age. Prins shows how both Robinson and H.D. experimented with meters, creating metrical effects that suited their own language and moment, translating styles of verse as well as words and phrases. Other chapters, “The Education of Electra” and “Dancing Greek Letters” on The Bacchae, consider how women translated Greek tragedy into performance in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, primarily, but not always in university settings. Prins’s book makes newly visible an expansive, significant part of women’s literary culture.

Tricia Lootens’s book The Political Poetess: Victorian Femininity, Race, and the Legacy of Separate Spheres (Princeton, N.J: Princeton Univ. Press, 2017) offers a game-changing look at our understanding of the figure of the Victorian poetess. Arguing that the idea of gendered separate spheres dividing the domestic from the political has always been (and remains) a fantasy, Lootens demonstrates the crucial role that race plays in that fantasy. The dream of separate spheres is itself political and deeply intertwined with public, patriotic poetry of women such as Felicia Hemans, Emma Lazarus, and Julia Ward Howe. Domestic femininity, patriotism, transatlantic slavery—this third term, Lootens argues, is as central to Poetess politics as are the first two. Returning again and again to the refrain “who made the Poetess white? No one; not ever,” Lootens ranges from Phyllis Wheatley to Germaine de Staël to Hemans to...