Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

INineteenth-Century Women Poets is a major new anthology, selecting widely from writings produced in a period that has traditionally been associated with relatively few eminent female poets. Opening with Anna Laetitia Barbauld's petition to William Wilberforce and ending with the myth-making Irish writers of the Celtic revival, Nineteenth-Century Women Poets rediscovers rich and diverse female traditions. The anthology presents the work of over one hundred women writers. Besides featuring distinguished middle-class poets such as Felicia Hemans, Elizabeth Barrett-Browning, and Christina Rossetti, the collection presents work by authors such as Maria Jane Jewsbury, Augusta Webster, and Michael Field, whose significance is only now becoming apparent. It achieves range and depth by reprinting poems by working-class, colonial, and political poets, in addition to very substantial selections from the work of major figures. The collection draws on first editions wherever possible. The chronological span of the anthology provides a unique perspective on women's poetry from the late-Romantic period to the Victorian fin-de-siècle. The editorial commentary and headnotes are a rich resource of women's history. They supply biographical details, document the activities and publications of individual poets, examine the political formations and cultural groupings to which these writers belonged, and describe the print media which made the development of their work possible, in particular the minority journals that allowed them a voice. Nineteenth-Century Women Poets identifies the thematic interconnections between different women writers, disclosing their common preoccupations with marriage, slavery, war, national identity, religion, and sexuality. It reveals how poetic styles and attitudes were transformed across the course of one hundred years, from the poet of sensibility to the New Woman.

Table of contents provided by Syndetics

• Introduction
• Note on the Texts
• Tynan and others (100 in all)
• Sources and Notes Select Bibliography
• Index of Titles and First Lines
• Index of Selected Topics

Reviews provided by Syndetics

CHOICE Review

A companion to Eighteenth Century Women Poets, ed. by Roger Lonsdale (CH, Mar'96), this volume offers selections from major and minor British women writers, including much work "not easily available elsewhere," as the editors correctly note. Although it overlaps some with Victorian Women Poets, ed. by Angela Leighton and Margaret Reynolds (1995), the present volume generally includes different selections and twice as many poets. The introduction identifies major themes that emerge in the poems--"factory conditions and industrial labor, slavery and abolitionism, marriage and its discontents, motherhood, the 'fallen' woman and the prostitute, militarism and the rise of nationalism, and colonial experience." The editors situate the poets in social and political groupings and professional affiliations, and argue that a significant shift in style and genre took place over the course of the century, from the "monumental legend" and "oceanic monody" to the dramatic monologue and dramatized lyric, which they see as the literary embodiment of "the fractured experience that came from social rifts that simply could not be healed." The indexes helpfully include subjects as well as titles, first lines, and authors. A useful and timely addition to all public, undergraduate, and graduate collections. C. Walker; Carleton College

Author notes provided by Syndetics

Isobel Armstrong is Professor of English at Birkbeck College, University of London. Joseph Bristow is Senior Lecturer in English at the University of York and currently holds the position of Senior External Research Fellow at Stanford University. Catharine Sharrock is Lecturer in English at the University of East Anglia.