Victorian Women Poets

Scholarship on women poets in 2019 again demonstrates the significance of periodical contexts and archival materials. A number of scholars this year reveal the ongoing work needed to develop complex understandings of women poets, their poetry, and their engagement in the publication and business of poetry writing. In addition to this focus on contextualization, scholarship also emphasizes the multimodality of Victorian women’s poetry, illuminating fascinating connections between disciplines and temporal boundaries. Interest in late-nineteenth-century writers remains strong with attention to decadence and ecological concerns as a means of expanding scholarly conceptions of the Victorian period.

Once again, scholarship in 2019 shows the prominence of women poets in Victorian studies. As Linda K. Hughes notes in her introduction to the newest edited volume on Victorian women poets, The Cambridge Companion to Victorian Women’s Poetry (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2019), the biggest difference between scholarship from the 1990s and today is the availability of women’s poetry due to digitization (p. 1). This unprecedented access to women’s poetry has changed our attitudes surrounding literary annuals and periodicals: “once dismissed as ephemeral literary trash, they have become important sites of research on women’s poetry and women’s agency as editors, writers, and readers” (p. 1). Digitization has also increased our attention to the volume of poetry written by women—from more prominent figures to obscure and understudied poets—and the significant place that poetry held within the Victorian imagination. Hughes’s edited collection examines women’s poetry through historically contextualized readings and analyses to locate the complex poetic techniques and voicings that “make so many women’s poems memorable” (p. 3).

Much scholarship this year emphasized the prominence of periodicals as an “important site of research” (Hughes, p. 1). Sarah Anne Storti’s recovery of Letitia Landon offers an exciting and innovative look at the poet as a “media theorist and practitioner,” drawing attention to Landon’s experimental poetics in early-nineteenth-century print media (p. 533). “Letitia Landon: Still a Problem” (VP 57, no. 4 [2019]: 533–556) provides fresh insight into the publication history of Landon’s works in magazines and literary annuals, revealing her role in print culture and her capacity for not only embedding multiple forms of media as a hallmark of her poetics, but also an ability to exploit and critique the production of nineteenth-century media through what Storti terms “a culture of recycling” (p. 537). This innovative facility to rework her own published poems leads Storti to label Landon the “muse of reuse,” provocatively suggesting that her poems are recyclable objects dependent upon publication contexts. This enlightening aspect of Landon’s publication history asks scholars to see the poet anew—not from a biographical context, as she has often been read, but as a leading media theorist of the nineteenth century.

While not solely focused on women poets, Caley Ehnes’s Victorian Poetry and the Poetics of the Literary Periodical (Edinburgh: Edinburgh Univ. Press, 2019) explores the literary periodicals of the 1860s to examine how poetry functioned as part of the publication’s branding. Indeed, Ehnes argues that the centrality of literary periodicals to the careers of poets suggests that these periodicals shaped both poetic form and the purpose of poetry for middle-class readers and the poets themselves. To focus attention on the periodical and its poetry, the monograph is organized according to different middle-class publications (weeklies, shilling monthlies, religious periodicals, and the sensation magazine, Argosy) rather than a set of authors. In the context of women poets, Ehnes’s chapter on the Argosy is most important as it examines how women poets such as Christina Rossetti, Isa Craig, Jean Ingelow, and Sarah Williams negotiated the conventions of sentimental poetry to produce a new poetics, “defined both through and against conventional representations of the Victorian poetess” (p. 17). The chapter emphasizes the Argosy’s poems as a product of the literary market and its identification with sensation (and thereby sentimental poetics), which placed a certain demand upon poetic form. Women poets, therefore, adopted the “feminine” style of sentiment and sensation—the “pose of the poetess...