The Cambridge Companion to Victorian Women's Poetry ed. by Linda K. Hughes (review)

The Cambridge Companion to Victorian Women's Poetry is a groundbreaking work that offers crucial glimpses into the various avenues that future scholarship in this field will be able to pursue. The main problem that troubles the text—the question of how Victorian women's poetry can still be considered a category of its own—is foregrounded by Linda K. Hughes in her inspiring introduction and straightforwardly is addressed by Isobel Armstrong in her compelling afterword.

Hughes wisely organizes the volume thematically rather than chronologically, with fifteen chapters grouped into four categories: "Form and the Senses," "Women's Poetry in the World," "Nurturance and Contested Naturalness," and "Reading Victorian Women's Poetry." Confronting millions of digitized pages from annuals, gift books, monthly or weekly periodicals, and daily newspapers (an overwhelming embarrassment of material available to readers today), Hughes follows a logical middle path, including both the well-known Victorian women poets who have dominated the canon until now and many previously unknown or little-discussed figures. Most prominently, scholars focus here on Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Christina Rossetti, with frequent references to Felicia Hemans, Alice Meynell, and Michael Field. However, in order to make evident the tremendous breadth of currently available material, the collection impressively offers analyses of more than one hundred Victorian women poets.

The first section of the book, "Form and the Senses," is rich and multifaceted, bringing together formal issues in Victorian women's poetry (in essays by Monique R. Morgan and Meredith Martin) with questions of illustration (Lorraine Janzen Kooistra) and embodiment and touch (Jason R. Rudy). In her fascinating chapter "Haunted by Voice," Elizabeth Helsinger joins other scholars in the volume in her attentiveness to forms of silence that both troubled and intrigued Victorian women poets. Indeed, variations of the word silence appear over one hundred times in this collection. Given my own interests, I was pleased by critics' numerous observations about the complex affiliations between Victorian women's poetry and silence.

At the same time, I was disappointed by the absence of attention paid to Victorian women poets' active involvement in the nineteenth-century sonnet revival. For example, Barrett Browning and Rossetti (both prolific sonneteers) are discussed more than any other poets in this book. Yet while Barrett Browning's Aurora Leigh (1856) is mentioned fifty-nine times in the collection, her grieving sonnets of 1844 are never discussed. These sonnets not only helped to inspire Robert Browning's love for her and were later reworked in her Sonnets from the Portuguese (1850), but also served as revisions of William Wordsworth's more compensatory sonnets. (Wordsworth wrote over five hundred sonnets and edited one of Barrett Browning's sonnets about him.) Similarly, Barrett Browning's dense yet very popular Sonnets from the Portuguese is mentioned only twice in the section on sonnet sequences in Morgan's chapter. But here no commentary is made about how Sonnets from the Portuguese revises Barrett Browning's grieving sonnets, which describe her incapacitating grief following her brother's death (the very death that haunts her amatory sonnets). Women's forceful role in the nineteenth-century sonnet revival is neglected in the volume as a whole, perhaps because critics were working against the Victorian expectation that women write shorter lyric poems.

Highlights include the multiple ways that critics in this volume show the heterogeneity of what it meant to be a Victorian woman poet. For example, Alexis Easley adds to gender other markers of difference such as race, class, age, ethnicity, religion, sexuality, and disability. Likewise, Alison Chapman echoes the recent global turn in literary studies by stressing how Victorian women poets embraced transatlanticism, transnationality, and cosmopolitism. Kirstie Blair adds another dimension to the unified way that Victorian women poets have been understood in the past, exploring class, regional identity, and dialect in working women's poems and showing how local verse...