Learned Poets
Female poets faced challenges beyond those confronted by novelists. Unlike novels–which held a low position in the hierarchy of cultural production–poetry, with its classical origins and long male tradition, stood at the pinnacle of high culture. Attempting serious poetry could be risky for women.
For much of the nineteenth century, men and women alike commonly assumed that women were not capable of true creative genius or sustained intellectual inquiry. Hence, evidence of high literary ambition by a woman could prompt especially condescending critical commentary.
At the same time, poetry paid less than fiction, and the poet’s implied lack of financial need served some women well, permitting pursuit of a literary career with little of the social taint associated with work for pay.
Elizabeth Barrett Browning 1806-1861
Elizabeth Barrett Browning was one of the most successful and respected poets of the nineteenth century. As a young girl she scorned the literary genres and modes of expression associated with women’s writing and dreamed of becoming a great poet in the style of classical antiquity. There were no female models for such poetic ambition, but Elizabeth set to work. She read voraciously and studied Greek–attaining a level of mastery almost unheard of in a woman.
Aurora Leigh (1857), her most ambitious work, saw more than twenty editions by 1900. For most of the twentieth century, literary histories tended to mention her as an appendix to discussions of her husband, Robert Browning. Her significant literary achievements were obscured until the 1970s, when feminist critics recognized Barrett Browning as a powerful, independent voice of social criticism and an innovative poet who anticipated movements in modern versification.
In 1826, at age twenty, Elizabeth Barrett published An Essay on Mind, with Other Poems, anonymously and at the expense of her grandmother's companion Mary Trepsack. The title poem attempts to survey the history of poetry, philosophy, and science from ancient Greece to the present day.
George Eliot, 1819-1880
Although she is remembered mainly for her novels, George Eliot also published two volumes of poetry in the course of her illustrious literary career. The Spanish Gypsy explores the conflicts that arise in a woman's life when she must choose between great duty and the prospect of a happy marriage. The book was widely reviewed and received mixed, though mostly laudatory, critical assessment. The reviewer for the Spectator found it "much the greatest poem on any wide scope...which has ever proceeded from a woman."
After the Spanish Gypsy, Eliot never again attempted a book-length poem, but she did continue to write shorter narrative poems and some lyrics.
This rare presentation copy of The Spanish Gypsy was inscribed by Eliot to Emmanuel Deutsch, a Talmudic scholar who instructed her in Hebrew and influenced some of the ideas which later developed into her novel Daniel Deronda.
The volume contains over 100 of Eliot’s substantial corrections and revisions in ink.
"Dear Mr. Langford.
Would you kindly send me another copy of the Spanish Gypsy? The reason I am so exorbitant is that I have been making corrections in the copy you sent me before, and I want to make a duplicate of them to send to Germany as soon as possible.
Sincerely yours
M.A. Lewes"
[George Eliot]
Christina Rossetti, 1830-1894
In Rossetti's lifetime, opinion was divided over whether she or Elizabeth Barrett Browning was the greatest female poet of the era. In any case, after Browning's death in 1861, readers and critics saw Rossetti as her rightful successor.
Goblin Market was Rossetti's first commercially published volume of poetry. The title poem–a moral allegory of temptation, indulgence, sacrifice, and redemption, with pronounced sexual under-tones–remains her most discussed work to this day.
Critics continue to study Rossetti's response to and influence on a women writers' tradition. During the last quarter of the twentieth century, feminist critics were especially concerned with Rossetti’s critique of patriarchal amatory values and gender relations. Christina Rossetti has been called the greatest Victorian woman poet, but her poetry is increasingly being recognized as among the most beautiful and innovative of the period by either sex.
Augusta Webster, 1837-1894
Augusta Davies was born in Dorset in 1837, the daughter of a naval officer. She pursued an unusually progressive course of education for a young girl, studying Greek–ostensibly to help a younger brother–and taking a particular interest in Greek drama. During her long career as a writer, she published more than a dozen volumes of verse, as well as many social and political essays concern-ing women's rights and responsibilities.
In 1863 Augusta married Thomas Webster, a fellow (and later law lecturer) at Trinity College, Cambridge. They had one daughter. Much of her work published thereafter concerns the difficulties and complexities of forming a happy marital union.
Webster was the first female writer to hold elective office. She worked tirelessly for women’s suffrage, and in 1879 and 1885 was elected to the London School Board.
Michael Field
[Katharine Bradley, 1846-1914]
[Edith Cooper, 1862-1913]
"Michael Field" was the pen name of two women who collaboratively published poetry and verse dramas. Katharine Bradley and her sixteen-year-old niece, Edith Cooper, formed an emotional and artistic bond that produced twenty-eight plays and eight volumes of poetry. They lived together from the late 1870s until the end of their lives.
Reviewers praised the publications of Michael Field until they discovered that the supposed male author was, in fact, two women. Bradley believed that their sex hindered their literary and critical success.
Long Ago, considered by many to be their best book of poetry, is a series of lyrics extrapolated from fragments of Sappho’s poetry and spoken in Sappho’s voice.
Critics disagree on whether Bradley and Cooper were an unusually close aunt and niece, intimate friends, or lesbian lovers. However, most scholars agree that for them poetry was both an act of rebellion and a vow of mutual devotion.