Table Of ContentWOMEN'S POETRY IN THE ENLIGHTENMENT
Also by Isobel Armstrong
ARTHUR HUGH CLOUGH
ROBERT BROWNING: Writers and their Background (editor)
THE MAJOR VICTORIAN POETS: Reconsiderations (editor)
MANSFIELD PARK: Penguin Critical Studies
NINETEENTH-CENTURY WOMEN POETS: An Oxford
Anthology (co-edited by Joseph Bristow, with Cath Sharrock)
SENSE AND SENSIBILITY: Penguin Critical Studies
VICTORIAN SCRUTINIES: Reviews of Poetry, 1830-1870
VICTORIAN POETRY: Poetry, Poetics and Politics
Also by Virginia Blain
THE FEMINIST COMPANION TO LITERATURE IN ENGLISH
Women's Writing from the Middle Ages to the Present
CAROLINE BOWLES SOUTHEY: The Making of a Woman Writer
Also edited by Isobel Armstrong and Virginia Blain
WOMEN'S POETRY, LATE ROMANTIC TO LATE VICTORIAN
Gender and Genre,1830-1900
Wotnen's Poetry in the
Enlighten111ent
The Making of a Canon, 1730-1820
Edited by
Isobel Armstrong
Professor of English
Birkbeck College
University of London
and
Virginia Blain
Associate Professor of English
Macquarie University
Sydney
in association with
Palgrave Macmillan
First published in Great Britain 1999 by
MACMILLAN PRESS LTD
Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS and London
Companies and representatives throughout the world
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN 978-1-349-27026-2 ISBN 978-1-349-27024-8 (eBook)
DOI 10.1007/978-1-349-27024-8
First published in the United States of America 1999 by
ST. MARTIN'S PRESS, INC.,
Scholarly and Reference Division,
175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010
ISBN 978-0-333-69151-9
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Women's poetry in the Enlightenment: the making of a canon, 1730-1820
I edited by Isobel Armstrong and Virginia Blain.
p. ern.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-333-69151-9 (cloth)
1. English poetry-Women authors-History and criticism. 2. Women
and literature-Great Britain-History-18th century. 3. Women and
literature-Great Britain-History-19th century. 4. English
poetry-18th century-History and criticism. 5. English
poetry-19th century-History and criticism. 6. Enlightenment
-Great Britain. 7. Canon (Literature) I. Armstrong, Isobel.
II. Blain, Virginia, 1945-
PR555.W6W66 1998
821'.5099287-dc21 97-42321
CIP
Selection and editorial matter © Isobel Armstrong and Virginia Blain 1999
Text © Macmillan Press Ltd 1999
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 1999 978-0-333-69151-9
All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made
without written permission.
No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with
written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and
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Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to
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accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and
sustained forest sources.
10987654321
08 07 06 05 04 03 02 01 00 99
Contents
Preface vii
Isobel Armstrong and Virginia Blain
Notes on the Contributors xiii
Part I The Sensuous Eighteenth Century: 1
Minds and Bodies
1 Sensuousness in the Poetry of Eighteenth-Century
Women Poets 3
Margaret Anne Doody
2 'All Passion Extinguish' d': The Case of
Mary Chandler, 1687-1745 33
David Shuttleton
3 'A Dialogue': Elizabeth Carter's Passion
for the Female Mind 50
Lisa A. Freeman
Part II The Feminist Political Project 65
4 Mary Seymour Montague: Anonymity
and 'Old Satyrical Codes' 67
Isobel Grundy
5 The Female Poet and the Poetess: Two Traditions
of British Women's Poetry, 1780-1830 81
Anne K. Mellor
6 The Politics of Vision: Anna Barbauld's 'Eighteen
Hundred and Eleven' 99
Maggie Favretti
v
vi Contents
Part III Protest and Patronage 111
7 'This Muse-born Wonder': the Occluded
Voice of Ann Yearsley, Milkwoman and
Poet of Clifton 113
Mary Waldron
8 The Maid and the Minister's Wife:
literary Philanthropy in Regency York 127
Roger Sales
Part IV Remaking Genres and Subjectivities 143
9 Romantic Women Poets: Inscribing the Self 145
Stuart Curran
10 Homosocial Women: Martha Sansom,
Constantia Grierson, Mary Leapor and
Georgie Verse Epistle 167
Kate Lilley
11 Charlotte Smith's Elegiac Sonnets:
Losses and Gains 184
Judith Hawley
Part V Finale: A Female Canon? 199
12 Fashioning a Female Canon: Eighteenth-Century
Women Poets and the Politics of the Anthology 201
Elizabeth Eger
Index 216
Preface
'[S]ome essential work has been done - the spade-work-of locat
ing poets, finding their publications and manuscripts, and giv
ing a coherent account of their individual lives', Margaret Anne
Doody announces at the beginning of the first essay in this vol
ume. The essays on women's poetry of the eighteenth and early
nineteenth centuries presented here have a context in the steady
work of republication, editing and anthologizing which has gone
on in the past decade or so. That work, initiated by Roger
Lonsdale's splendid Oxford anthology of eighteenth-century
women poets in 1989, continues and will continue. Its inevitable
consequence, however, is a further stage of critical investigation
as new questions emerge. Some of these questions are voiced by
Stuart Curran in another essay in this volume: What new mod
els of literary history must be constructed as women's poetry is
rediscovered? How do we prevent ourselves from assimilating
women merely to a 'paradigm drawn up and enacted by men'
and arrive at a model which genuinely reconfigures literary, in
tellectual and cultural understanding of the late Enlightenment?
How do the intensely self-conscious developments of literary theory
-New Historicism, Cultural Materialism, Deconstruction, Psycho
analytic critique - relate to the feminist agenda of rediscovery?
To meditate on these issues may well mean, as Anne K. Mellor
affirms, that cherished 'hegemonic' notions concerning the pub
lic and private spheres allocated to men and women, on which
so much discussion of gender and writing has been founded,
have to be questioned.
It was to ask, and to begin to answer, such questions that we
organized an international conference, 'Rethinking Women's
Poetry, 1730-1930', held at Birkbeck College, University of Lon
don, in the summer of 1995. We assumed that an interrogation
of the ways we read women's poetry, and the assumptions we
make while reading it, would be concurrent with, and indeed
indivisible from, our rediscovery of it. That was why we decided
to use the word 'rethinking' rather than 'rereading'. As Curran
remarks, the question '"Is it any good?" - the question I have
vii
viii Preface
been asked over and over about the literature by women that I
study, read, and teach' is an ideological rather than an aesthetic
question, an attempt to prevent gender from disrupting tradi
tional structures of value. Accordingly, the five groups of essays
in this book ask rather different questions. The first group con
siders how women's poetry reconfigures a customary epistemo
logical binary, mind and body, revising eighteenth-century
philosophical assumptions about mind and body, and probing
the implications for a new understanding of social organization
which follow from the questioning of this antithesis. A second
group explores the feminist political project of the Enlightenment,
arguing for a 'strong', ideologically radical reading of feminist
politics, in terms both of gender politics and revolutionary politics.
The woman poet's powerful intervention into the 'public' sphere
is the theme of all three essays. A section on the politics of the
patronage of working-class poets follows: despite the often coer
cive expectations of the patron, working-class women poets could
discover forms of protest, but it is necessary to consider how
their texts were nevertheless often shaped by the ideology of
the patron. The fourth section is concerned with the ways women
poets created and mediated feminine subjectivities through
remaking traditional genres and poetic language. Lastly, the gender
politics and concepts of history bound up in the making of
anthologies, both eighteenth-century and contemporary, and the
cultural implications of the 'canon' constructed through collec
tions and selections, is the topic of the final section.
It is appropriate to begin where we end, with our section en
titled 'Finale: A Female Canon?', and remark on Elizabeth Eger's
salutary essay on 'Fashioning a Female Canon: Eighteenth-Century
Women Poets and the Politics of the Anthology', because it is in
many ways both admonitory preface as well as conclusion to this
collection. She traces how the anthology was a major culprit in
the cultural forgetting of women poets, most notably through
the omission of politically radical poets of the 1790s from nine
teenth-century anthologies. If they were included, a limited rep
resentation of women's poetic activity prevailed. But, she warns,
the contemporary reinstatement of women's poetry carries its own
perils. It is too easy to establish women's writing as a counter
tradition, rather than investigating how it belonged to the central
debates of its culture.
In the first group of essays, 'The Sensuous Eighteenth Cen-
Preface ix
tury: Minds and Bodies', Margaret Anne Doody takes up the chal
lenge of cultural centrality. Women poets were as preoccupied
as male poets with the perception and rendering of sense data,
and were aware of the philosophical debates around sensation,
she argues, in her 'Sensuousness in the Poetry of Eighteenth
Century Women Poets'. But they did not assent to the hierarchi
cal taxonomy of sensation implied by Locke, deliberately disrupting
such organization for democratic purposes. Drawing on the poetry
of Ann Yearsley, Mary Leapor, Mary Robinson, Anna Seward and
Anna Laetitia Barbauld, she shows that women poets not only
expressed a sensuous empathy with animals (like themselves,
thought to be incapable of rationality), but insistently undermined,
through what she terms 'the Pythagorean theme', or the trans
migration of souls into the bodies of animals, the whole body/
mind antithesis on which the hierarchy of rational 'man' and
animals was based. Women's preoccupation with fairies and the
supernatural is related to this revolutionary Pythagoreanism,
because fairies are outside the cultural classifications which en
able social and gender relations to be enforced, and suggest new
understandings of commonality. In his "'All Passion Entinguish'd":
The Case of Mary Chandler, 1687-1745', David Shuttleton charts
Mary Chandler's struggle with anorexia and deformity, and her
attempts to find a discourse of Mind, reclaiming the rationality
denied to women which would challenge the derogatory con
structions of her condition current in eighteenth-century medi
cal accounts of the female body. Lisa A. Freeman's '"A Dialogue":
Elizabeth Carter's Passion for the Female Mind' explores the ways
in which the Bluestocking intellectual and satirist Elizabeth Carter
reverses the common association of femininity with the body by
connecting the body and the irrationality of its 'lower parts' with
a male speaker in her satirical poem. This lampoon radically
changes social and legal codes and 'the economics of matrimo
nial exchange' because 'Mind' is no longer the superior Platonic
provenance of masculinity.
In Part II, 'The Feminist Political Project', sexual politics and
radical politics are intertwined, and both are problematized, even
though all three writers here ultimately claim a 'strong' radical
reading of their poets. Isobel Grundy considers the pseudony
mous 'Mary Seymour Montague's' An Original Essay on Woman
(1771) and its challenge to Pope's Essay on Man. One of the prob
lems to be teased out is the status of anonymity, its function as
