Romantic Poetry by Women

ROMANTIC POETRY BY WOMEN 625 Shteir goes a long way to rectify the neglect of women (and girl) readers and writers in botany. Her book is a unique record of women's botanical writing from the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries - botany which was often directed at the education of girls. Indeed, it is hard to imagine a more encyclopedic account of this subject, though it is sometimes difficult to see the wood for the trees. Although she does not say so, her book is also an account of female resistance to a narrowly masculine definition of science: the mere professionalization and specialization of knowledge. Women were able to understand Linnaeus's system ofclassification and thereby to enfranchise themselves inone aspect ofscience.Jane Loudon (1807-58), the wife of the landscape designer John Claudius Loudon, is an example of this new kind of scientific woman, no longer content to erase herself in her writing by the use of the passive voice. Shteir's book is a record of the ways in which women could educate themselves outside the conventional academy and resist the arbitrary categories of maleprivileged knowledge: the sort ofresistance that Wordsworth celebrates in 'We Are Seven' and Dickens in the portrait ofSissy Jupe. George Eliot's active interest in the natural sciences is surely evidence of what had been achieved before the middle of the nineteenth century. So effective had this resistance become by the late 18205 that John Lindley, the first professor of botany at London University, dismissed Linnaeus's system as 'amusement for ladies' and replaced it with a system based on plant structure that was suitable for 'men of enlightened minds: Shteir concludes her book with a children's writer who was cold-shouldered out of the masculine world of botany (a field in which she had done distinguished work) into the world of Peter Rabbit: Beatrix Potter. But Peter Rabbit had his revenge on Peter Parley and Gradgrind in these volumes. The best essays return us to the questions that animated Sir Thomas Browne's speculative mind, the duetor dubitans in pursuit of a truth that may have more shapes (and discourses) than one. This is also the world of the amateur naturalist - Gilbert White or John Clare - not ignorant of the structures of science but prepared t'? dismiss their totalizing claims as 'darkness visible.' That sort of naturalist is the one whom Goldsmith also celebrates in his natural history writing, finding 'in every plant, in every insect, and every pebble, ... something to entertain his curiosity, and excite his speculation.' Romantic Poetry by Women STUART CURRAN J.R. de J. Jackson. Romantic Poetry by Women, a Bibliography, 1770-1835 Oxford: Clarendon Press 1993· xxx, 484. $129.00 cloth I cannot lay claim to a wholly disinterested perspective on this volume, but my own involvement on its sidelines perhaps gives me a unique take as its reviewer. Some years ago Professor Jackson and I discovered that we were Simultaneously at work 626 STUART CURRAN on a like inquiry into the extent and cultural significance of women's contributions to the ethos of Romantic poetry, and, in a sense of scholarly co-operation that I will always treasure as a model for collectiveendeavours, we decided to share ournotes. As Jackson was much farther along than I in establishing the ricimes5 of the bibliographical record, I happily offered him what new materials I had uncovered in exchange for the wealth of information hetumed over to me. Thus, long before this vohune was finished, I thought of this undertaking as a!1 essential reference work for scholarship in the long Romantic age. In its published version its scholarly virtues and its foundational character are even more magnified. There is not a week that I do not find myself turning to its pages for elucidation or discovery of some kind. Despite its price, this work should be considered as essential, a true vade mecum for any serious scholar of this period. Perhaps we need not be reminded at what we consider an advanced stage in the interrogation ofcanonical Romanticism thatonlyadozen years ago anyone wanting to uncover the ftill dimensions of women's impac~ on the publishing world of Romanticism...