Nineteenth-Century American Women Poets: An Anthology, and: A Sweet, Separate Intimacy: Women Writers of the American Frontier, 1800-1920 (review)

Nineteenth-Century American Women Poets: An Anthology. Edited by Paula Bernat Bennett. Malden: Blackwell, 1998. 524 pp. $88.95/$36.95 paper.

A Sweet, Separate Intimacy: Women Writers of the American Frontier, 1800-1920. Edited by Susan Cummins Miller. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2000. 446 pp. $59.95/$21.95 paper.

Scholars of nineteenth-century American women's literature have struggled to produce anthologies for classroom use that provide a diverse representation of writings and a critical framework through which to view these selections. With the recent publication of Nineteenth-Century American Women Poets and A Sweet, Separate Intimacy: Women Writers of the American Frontier, 1800-1920, Paula Bernat Bennett and Susan Cummins Miller have contributed to this effort, but with differing degrees of success.

Paula Bernat Bennett's years of recovery work have resulted in an incredibly useful text that challenges our preconceptions about nineteenth-century women's poetry and pushes us to think in more complicated ways about this genre and nineteenth-century American literature in general. "Like other scholars," Bennett writes in the introduction to Nineteenth-Century American Women Poets, "I had come to my field assuming that 'major' figures would be the heart of it. What I discovered, however,--at least where nineteenth-century American women's poetry was concerned--is that the heart lay elsewhere, not in the poet but in the poem" (xl). The genius of this anthology is that it is shaped according to this insight.

Nineteenth-Century American Women Poets consists of two sections. The first includes selections from thirty-eight poets, as well as a detailed headnote for each author. Represented here are well-known poets as well as those who have received almost no critical attention. Also included are many women writers who are better known today for their prose than their poetry. Many women of color are represented in this section, including Sarah Louisa Forten, Henrietta Cordelia Ray, and E. Pauline Johnson. This section is also notable for its inclusion and discussion of lesbian poetry, including poems by Frances Anne Butler Kemble, Celia Thaxter, Sophie Jewett, and, of course, Emily Dickinson. The second section of the anthology focuses on poems from newspapers and distinguishes Bennett's text from other anthologies of nineteenth-century American women poets. Most anthologies, including those that look at women writers, focus on "major" authors of the period and/or genre only, thus implicitly asserting that poems by lesser-known writers should remain unrecovered and unstudied. Bennett shatters this assumption by including some of the most interesting poems in this section, such as Maria W. Chapman's "The Times That Try Men's Souls," Elizabeth Stoddard's "Mercedes," and Mary E. Ashe Lee's "Afmerica."

While the poems are the substance of this anthology, Bennett's excellent introduction and headnotes also contribute to the success of the volume. In both the introduction and the headnotes, Bennett contextualizes the selections and grapples with some of the most challenging issues confronting scholars. She is particularly good when it comes to sentimentalism, demonstrating that women's poetry must play a central role in any consideration of this issue.

Covering roughly the same period, Susan Cummins Miller includes several of the same authors as Bennett. Her focus, however, is on these women's experiences on and reactions to the American frontier. Miller calls A Sweet, Separate Intimacy: Women Writers of the American Frontier, 1800-1920 "a pastiche designed to give the reader a taste of what women were thinking, feeling, and enduring in a century of transition" (7). This pastiche is made up of thirty-four women authors writing in a variety of genres and about a variety of geographical locations. Miller's inclusion of women of color, such as Marìa Amparo Ruiz de Burton, Sarah Winnemucca Hopkins, and Edith Maude Eaton (Sui Sin Far...