Eighteenth-Century Women Poets and Their Poetry: Inventing Agency, Inventing Genre

By Paula R. Backscheider

“Our sense of eighteenth-century poetic territory is immeasurably expanded by [this] excellent historical and cultural” study of UK women poets of the era (Cynthia Wall, Studies in English Literature).

This major work offers a broad view of the writing and careers of eighteenth-century women poets, casting new light on the ways in which poetry was read and enjoyed, on changing poetic tastes in British culture, and on the development of many major poetic genres and traditions.

Rather than presenting a chronological survey, Paula R. Backscheider explores the forms in which women wrote and the uses to which they put those forms. Considering more than forty women in relation to canonical male writers of the same era, she concludes that women wrote in all of the genres that men did but often adapted, revised, and even created new poetic kinds from traditional forms.

Backscheider demonstrates that knowledge of these women’s poetry is necessary for an accurate and nuanced literary history. Within chapters on important verse forms, she sheds light on such topics as women’s use of religious poetry to express ideas about patriarchy and rape; the important role of friendship poetry; same-sex desire in elegy by women as well as by men; and the status of Charlotte Smith as a key figure of the long eighteenth century, not only as a Romantic-era poet.

Co-Winner, James Russell Lowell Prize, Modern Language Association

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Dec 31, 2005
• ISBN: 9780801895906

Book preview

Eighteenth-Century Women Poets and Their Poetry

Eighteenth-Century Women Poets and Their Poetry

Inventing Agency, Inventing Genre

Paula R. Backscheider

© 2005 The Johns Hopkins University Press

All rights reserved. Published 2005

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

9  8  7  6  5  4  3  2  1

The Johns Hopkins University Press

2715 North Charles Street

Baltimore, Maryland 21218-4363

www.press.jhu.edu

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Backscheider, Paula R.

       Eighteenth-century women poets and their poetry : inventing

agency, inventing genre / Paula R. Backscheider.

          p. cm.

       Includes bibliographical references and index.

       ISBN 0-8018-8169-2 (alk. paper)

       1. English poetry—18th century—History and criticism. 2. Women and literature—Great Britain—History—19th century. 3. English poetry—Women authors—History and criticism. 4. Authorship—Sex differences—History—18th century. 5. Invention (Rhetoric)— History—18th century. 6. Literary form—History—18th century. I. Title.

PR555.W6B33 2005

821′.5099287—dc22

2004027038

A catalog record for this book is available from the British Library.

To

my daughter, Andrea, and

my women friends and colleagues

who wouldn’t let me walk away from this book

Contents

Acknowledgments

Abbreviations

Plan of the Book

Approaching the Poetry

The Chapters

1 Introduction

Changing Contexts

Systems, Gender, and Persistent Issues

Agency and the Marked Marker

2 Anne Finch and What Women Wrote

The Social and the Formal

Anne Finch and Popular Poetry

Poetry on Poetry

The Spleen as Legacy

3 Women and Poetry in the Public Eye

Poetry as News and Critique

The Woman Question

Elizabeth Singer Rowe

4 Hymns, Narratives, and Innovations in Religious Poetry

The Voice of Paraphrase

The Hymn as Personal Lyric

Religious Poetry as Subversive Narrative

Devout Soliloquies

5 Friendship Poems

The Legacy of Katherine Philips

Encouragement and the Counteruniverse

Jane Brereton

Adaptation and Ideology

6 Retirement Poetry

Beyond Convention

Memory, Time, and Elizabeth Carter

Reflection and Difference

7 The Elegy

What Did Women Write?

Representative Composers: Darwall and Seward

The Elegy and Same-Sex Desire

Entertainment and Forgetting

8 The Sonnet, Charlotte Smith, and What Women Wrote

The Sonnet and the Political

Sonnet Sequences

Women Poets and the Spread of the Sonnet

The Emigrants, Conversations, and Beachy Head

Smith as Transitional Poet

9 Conclusion

Biographies of the Poets

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Acknowledgments

How long this book has taken to research and write can be measured in the wonderful student assistants who have worked on it with me. Kim Snyder was the first, and she left a legacy of research notebooks and finding aids that never failed us. Melissa Roth became an expert on several poets, and her insights and lively advocacy for them improved the book. Jessica Smith Ellis, Jessie Jordan, Elizabeth Cater Childs, and Lynn Moody did super sleuthing. Heather Hicks and Sara Brown shared the drudgery for submission with the endless polishing of notes and bibliography, and Heather and Lacey Williams cheerfully survived all the way through page proofs. Day by day, these women were the smooth wheels that kept the work going, and they added humor and new learning experiences.

I am especially grateful to Martine Watson Brownley, Penny Ingram, and Devoney Looser, who read portions of the book and made many helpful suggestions. Tina even offered riverboat and late-night consultations. When my commitment to the book’s largest purposes wavered, they, together with Hilary Wyss, Alicia Carroll, Joy Leighton, and members of my former NEH seminars, especially Anna Battigelli, Catherine Ingrassia, Kathryn King, and Paula McDowell, encouraged me to continue. Stuart Curran allowed me to use his copy of Charlotte Smith’s Conversations for an extended time, Miller Solomon shared his entire Robert Dodsley collection, and Dave Haney, Tim Dykstal, and Jim Hammersmith were patient, on-site reference sources. Nancy Noe truly made the Auburn University library work for me; perhaps no library in the world would have completely supported this project, and Nancy worked tirelessly and imaginatively to give me access to whatever eighteenth- and twenty-first-century items I needed. Susan Gubar by a chance remark she has probably forgotten played an important part in my decision to write this book: she reminded me how often in my career I have reconsidered and tested paradigms and how much pleasure and intellectual stimulation this has brought me. The anonymous Johns Hopkins University Press reader, who provided thoughtful reflections on organization and meticulous attention to detail, and the copyeditor, Joanne Allen, went far beyond the call of duty, and I am deeply grateful. I especially thank John Richetti, who challenged me to write the chapter on eighteenth-century women’s poetry for the Cambridge History of English Literature and often discussed it with me; this book is the child of that project and was helped indirectly but substantially by Linda Bree and Cambridge University Press readers. Several chapters are expanded and adapted from it, and I thank the press for permission to excerpt from my essay. As always, I am more grateful than I can express for my husband’s encouragement and his part in creating the happy space in which I work.

Abbreviations

The following abbreviations are used either parenthetically in the text or in the notes to refer to frequently cited sources. There may be other sources in the bibliography under the names given below as abbreviations; when those names appear alone, without a short title, I am citing the sources given here.

Plan of the Book

The perpetual task of criticism, every generation or two, is to understand again the literature of the past. Literature which cannot survive this renewal of understanding, and live again in the critical sensibility of posterity, must contain some radical flaw of interest; it is perhaps in this sense that time is the test of poetry.

— ALLEN TATE

It is literary evolution that should be studied, because literature is a social form. In this connection, the issue that takes on enormous importance for us is the formation and successive changes of genres.

— BORIS ÉJXENBAUM, Theory of the Formal Method

Rather than a systematic introduction to eighteenth-century women’s poetry, a history of their poetry, or a unified, progressive argument, this book is an exploration of the forms in which women poets wrote. It recognizes some of their contributions to evolutions in poetic form and to changes in the work poetry does in the culture, and it highlights the beginnings of some distinctive strains that constitute traditions of women’s poetry. It pauses to use as case studies some special kinds of poetry, such as women’s circuit-of-Apollo poems and imitations of Tibullus’s elegies. These groups were selected partly because they have been relatively neglected and partly to illustrate the range of literary critical opportunities this poetry offers. I spend much less time on the poets about whom there is substantial criticism than on those about whom little has been written, although I have tried to guide the reader to the excellent work that Carole Barash, Stuart Curran, Kathryn King, Donna Landry, William McCarthy, Ann Messenger, Judith Pascoe, and others have done on a few poets.

My method requires quoting an unusually large number of poems either in their entirety or in substantial excerpts. Of course these quotations fulfill their usual functions, such as illustrating points, but they also allow the reader to sample some women’s poetry that is difficult to access. Many poems crucial to my arguments are available only on microfilm, in collections of rare books in a few places in the English-speaking world, or in modern books that are not readily available.¹ Thus, one of my book’s most useful features is its bringing out of obscurity little-known poetry that needs to be factored into literary and gender history. Over and over I discovered how less economically poetry can be summarized than unfamiliar or even unknown plays and novels. Because poetry is so compressed, and the language so allusive and metaphoric, no summary can capture what is being said without being, ironically, longer than the poem. Moreover, a poem can never be considered apart from its verbal and metrical music, and I have tried to allow poems to stand forth to be experienced and judged as poetry.

This book is intended for those desiring an entrée into eighteenth-century women’s poetry, for the adventurous, for the general reader who enjoys learning about literary history and women’s history, as well as for students and specialists of eighteenth-century literature, poetry, and women’s studies. My book assumes readers at least somewhat familiar with eighteenth-century poetry and the Great Tradition and appeals for a charitable awareness of the considerable challenges that the subject presents. My hope is that this book will fill several gaps and be a resource for scholars and critics who need a better-charted landscape, with sharper details, than is currently available. It joins the project of reconstructing the professional and personal culture in which poetry was written and disseminated. Harriet K. Linkin and Stephen C. Behrendt remind us that since 1985 the inclusion of women has brought about a wholesale rethinking of British Romanticism, both as an intellectual and cultural phenomenon and as a site of literary production.² Such a structural reorganization and reconception has occurred in eighteenth-century novel studies and is under way in drama studies, but it certainly is not under way in poetry studies. We do not need the cautions against rushing to canonize that are appearing in Romanticism criticism. For example, Isobel Armstrong writes, Mercifully, a canon has not yet been founded, for canons seal poets into hierarchies; but we have not found productive historical ways of thinking about female poets either.³ We are far from an equivalent of Julie Ellison’s encapsulating observation: Happily, it is difficult to introduce poems by Anna Laetitia Barbauld, Charlotte Smith, Joanna Baillie, Dorothy Wordsworth, Mary Tighe, Hannah More, and Felicia Hemans into courses on Romantic poetry without challenging the notion of Romanticism itself.⁴

This book also assumes that readers are willing to reconsider the familiar hierarchy of genres and modes. Women’s poetry, especially early women’s poetry, has often been trivialized. Allegedly about trivial subjects and having a tendency to lower rather than raise emotion, it has earned its neglect, its critics would say. For example, the death of a child is expected to be treated with sentimentality and pathos rather than with tragic or majestic dignity. Critics have searched out poems that prove this belief, and anthologizers have printed so few poems by women and printed the same ones so frequently that it is easy to believe that there are not many excellent poems by women. Gender takes the blame for what is really the unisex treatment of fashionable or perennial subjects in predictable, uninspired, mediocre metrics, structure, imagery, and language. Things have changed far too little since Gisela Ecker’s groundbreaking Feminist Aesthetics (1985), in which she rightly recognized that being a woman writer determined the status of the text and that the category was permeated with, inseparable from, stereotypes about women. More than twenty years ago feminists pointed out that the major strategy used to disqualify women’s literature and history from study was to trivialize it,⁵ and these responses persist.

Of all the genres, poetry, that sublime form of imaginative human and literary utterance, has the most closed canon. In other words, we know before we even begin to read whether a text is part of the canon or not.⁶ David Perkins reminds us that literary classifications have been determined and maintained in a very few ways: by tradition, ideological interests, the aesthetic requirements of writing a literary history, the assertions of authors and their contemporaries about their affinities and antipathies, the similarities that the literary historian observes among authors and/or texts, and the needs of professional careers and the politics of power in institutions.⁷ Almost all of these almost always work against women, easily becoming what Eve Sedgwick styled as a canon constituted and motivated by ‘a priceless history’ of male-male pedagogic or pederastic relations.⁸

Canon formation and maintenance is a dynamic, constantly defended and contested process. For more than a decade, in the wake of Roger Lonsdale’s and Joyce Fullard’s anthologies of poetry by women, we have acknowledged that we need to build on their monumental contributions and gain experience with the works of a wide range of poets. In the past decade too we have accepted the contingent nature of aesthetic judgments and the canon.⁹ Contingency authorizes and legitimates discarding some standards, substituting others, and therefore brings all into question. We know now to take into consideration a time’s aesthetic values, its politics, its ruling class, its opinions about the work that literature should do in society, and changes in sensibility and structures of feeling. We can identify authoritative groups of canonizers, track their long arc of influence, and watch for incidents of successful critical promotion. We can see how such things as demands for dense classical allusion exclude all but certain classes of educated people with similar values and goals. Suvir Kaul has pointed out that even if the poetic idiom created by Duck and Collier, or by Gray or Thomson or Cowper or George Crabbe, represents a shift toward vernacular rhythms and speech, the poetry produced by these writers is marked by Milton’s Latinate sublimities, or the romantic archaisms of Spenser, or simply by the formal and metrical codes by which poets conducted their business.¹⁰ These are certainly codes, and those who would be poets had to gain access to them.

My readers will also find far more in these poems than truth burst[ing] forth in defiance of expected patriarchal conventions.¹¹ To seek and privilege anti-patriarchal themes falsifies women’s—and human—literary history, and while I give the theme of defiance its due, I believe that emphasis on it has been almost as much a detriment to assessment as trivialization. There are, of course, innumerable ways a text can burst forth in defiance of patriarchal conventions, and the poetry I discuss is filled with "not that way, this way" poems. Yet defiance and resistance to patriarchy are not primary motivations for many of these women. There are not many attacks as direct as Aphra Behn’s epilogue to Sir Patient Fancy, and our critical methodologies are perhaps better suited to working with them. Palimpsests, works whose designs conceal or obscure deeper, less accessible (and less socially acceptable) levels of meaning, and the playful parodic proliferation, accumulating dramatizations of performances of gender that reveal the radical contingency in the relation between sex and gender in the face of cultural configurations of causal unities that are regularly assigned to be natural and necessary, found at least now and then in all of these women’s poetry, are far more subtle, nuanced, and varied than familiar examples of defiance.¹² After all, gender is constructed within the social relations of a specific community and time, and women’s material circumstances, experiences, social position and obligations, and understandings vary considerably within the same nation and time period. As Kathryn King says of Jane Barker, "If the Poetical Recreations verse is any indication, poetry by women in this period exhibits a greater range of tones, moods, manners, and voices than existing feminist paradigms, with their heavy stress upon gender difference and patriarchal silencing, prepare us to recognize.¹³ Roger Lonsdale’s research led him to conclude that the world of eighteenth-century poetry is at once less predictable and more familiar than we have been led to believe,"¹⁴ and if we do not think in gendered categories, that statement is almost as true of poetry by women as it is of poetry by men.

The truth is that women poets of this period are in dialogue with other women (friends and poets), with their contemporaneous male writers, and, like all writers, with the poetry they have inherited and are reading—especially the best-known and most respected. With King, I recognize the need for protocols of reading responsive to dialogical and sociable as well as subversive and contestatory elements, and, indeed, I have discovered the former to be more useful. The appreciation women have for poetry and their longing to be poets gleam throughout eighteenth-century women’s writing. A place to express themselves in a time when outspokenness and even close female friendships were regarded with suspicion and often forbidden,¹⁵ their poetry records their ambivalences, their aspirations, their experiences, and their participation in the artistic, political, and civic life of their time.

I have come to believe that the need to reintroduce women into the literary history of poetry is greater than the need in the history of fiction and, certainly, drama. I could argue this contention in various ways, but here I will simply give two reasons. First, poetry was far and away the most frequently published type of literature,¹⁶ and there were many, many women writing a lot of poetry. Statistical studies of women writers by Judith Stanton reveal that poetry was women’s most popular literary form, and she calculates that 263 women published poetry between 1660 and 1800 (in comparison, she tallies 201 women who published novels). Until 1760, however, the average number of women publishing poetry in a decade was 7; the figures Stanton gives for the next decades are 19 in the 1760s, 36 in the 1770s, 55 in the 1780s, and 64 in the 1790s.¹⁷ Roger Lonsdale asserts that in the first decade of the eighteenth century only two women published collections of their poetry, while in the 1790s more than thirty did (Lonsdale, xxi). James Robert de J. Jackson has identified more than eight hundred women poets in England and America who published 1,402 first editions between 1770 and 1835.¹⁸ We do not even know basic biographical information about most of them or how they attained access to publication. With a very few exceptions, all of the painstaking work that has been done on Behn needs to be performed on them. At this time we lack even the countercanon, that stage that most genres in literary periods go through before the canon changes. In other words, there was a fairly well-accepted list of eighteenth-century women novelists that were studied and written about before it became standard to teach a text by Behn, Haywood, and another woman in courses on the novel. And there are now several anthologies of plays by long-eighteenth-century women dramatists. We do not even know how women’s poetry helped women living within Simone de Beau-voir’s counteruniverse order, interpret, mythologize, or dispose of their own experience.¹⁹

Second, some representative facts about the state of the field point to the need for a new explanatory model for eighteenth-century poetry. A few women have been recognized as excellent poets, as Anne Finch, Countess of Winchilsea, and Charlotte Smith are. The truth is that we have not integrated either into the literary history of the eighteenth century. I would agree with Brent Raycroft that their cases measure a collective failure of criticism.²⁰ We are just beginning to understand Smith’s own poetry and contribution to what is called the sonnet revival, and we have not yet begun to look at other forms revived, developed, or significantly altered by women that are equally or even more important.

To begin to integrate women’s poetry, we need to work through each poetic kind, and I recognize four lines of inquiry. One follows masculine forms that women influenced profoundly, most notably the retirement poem, the classical elegy, and the metrical tale. The second considers genres that women shaped and developed and then lost to the male tradition (without Stuart Curran’s efforts, the sonnet would be an example). Third, genres associated with female writing in earlier centuries that women made their own but that are now believed to be static, even dead; they await serious attention using today’s powerful theoretical tools. The friendship poem, that form that Katherine Philips left as her legacy for women, is a premier example. It reveals itself as remaining vital, flexible, and ever present—and continuing into our day. The prizewinning poet Marilyn Hacker, for instance, wrote in 1997 that she wished someone would pay her the compliment, I love the way you write about women’s friendships.²¹ Another is the domestic poem, which at this point is usually studied as Swift’s influence and undifferentiated by subject, technique, decade, or individual writer. It actually needs to be studied in connection with poems of common life and situated within the line of poems stretching from John Gay’s Shepherd’s Week through John Dyer’s The Fleece to William Cowper’s The Task. The fourth line of inquiry tracks genres now usually excluded from literary study that women shared in shaping and making useful in the culture perhaps equally with men. Eighteenth-century religious poetry is the most obvious example, and its treatment contrasts strikingly with sixteenth- and seventeenth-century religious verse. Not only do women’s poems underscore its importance and excellence in the century but they illuminate the work to which poets adapted its varied kinds. For instance, Elizabeth Hands used a narrative paraphrase for a scathing exposé of master-servant power relationships and of how male bonding can push lust into the most repulsive kinds of rape.

Throughout the eighteenth century women, like men, were developing their own uses and kinds of poetry, were leading poetic movements—and following poetic movements and fads. They earned the right to be treated seriously as individuals and as artists within a generation or a strain of poetry. To redeploy Jerome McGann’s words, the telling of Herstory often calls out History, and so it will in this case.²² Certainly the critical landscape of the eighteenth-century novel has changed. Instead of seeing the Dream Team of novelists run on a strobe-lighted court, we see shifting configurations of writers and understand how they relate to one another horizontally and vertically. As a result, we see them in a variety of contexts, especially perhaps political, social, and historical. In the process, we have created better explanatory models, models not only more true to historical facts but also more satisfying for our own understanding of a genre that is very important to us and of its dynamic contributions to shaping the modern mind. To some extent, I expect to show how the study of women poets will yield the same kinds of major revisions in literary history.

Approaching the Poetry

My first mission became to carve out methodologies to work with the hundreds—literally hundreds—of women poets, few of whose works are in print or have ever been reprinted since the eighteenth century. Although it meant the sacrifice of important figures such as Margaret Cavendish, Katherine Philips, Behn, and Barker, I chose to concentrate on eighteenth-century poets alone. After reading the complete poetic works of almost one hundred women poets, I selected approximately forty who seem to have been influential in determining the directions poetry took over a long stretch of time less studied than that of the Restoration figures, and they embody the contexts that most interest me— literary, social, and political. With two exceptions, I chose not to write about poets, groups of poets, or subjects of poetry that had already received sophisticated, recent critical attention. Thus, for instance, working-class poets, the influence of Pope’s poetry on women writers, and abolition poetry are taken into account but largely excluded.²³ This book does feature some predictable characters—Anne Finch and Charlotte Smith—and some that ought to be predictable, such as Lady Mary Wortley Montagu. Even for these figures the range, experimentation, and excellence of their work are not sufficiently known. More commonly, however, I chose far more neglected poets and cast even somewhat familiar ones in unfamiliar roles and more prominent positions in literary history. Elizabeth Singer Rowe, for instance, if recognized at all today, is known for her piety or her rather macabre dedication to her dead husband. Finch, Mary Barber, Jane Brereton, Elizabeth Carter, and Anna Laetitia Barbauld, all excellent poets who span the century, wrote tributes to Rowe.²⁴ In 1739 Brereton summarized the common opinion to Carter, writing that Rowe had a fine Genius; and no Attachments in this World, to prevent her indulging, and improving it. Her Stile is flowing, and perfectly Poetical; her Descriptions are exceeding lively.²⁵ The criteria they emphasized in Rowe are familiar to us: metrical beauty, structure, precision, emotional force, dramatic immediacy, and the amount and vividness of description. I attempt to restore her to her former position in literary history.

Another example of a poet whom I treat in some revisionary ways is Elizabeth Carter, not an especially prolific poet but an important transition figure between Rowe and Smith and the kinds of poetry and poetic lives they represent. Carter, also a transitional figure in the intellectual line represented by Mary Chudleigh, Constantia Grierson, and Hester Chapone, created a space for herself that was both modest and assertive, a proper station and a personal working life that gave her considerable freedom. She welcomed publishing as a profession appropriate to women and championed that attitude with her Bluestocking correspondents.²⁶ She was praised for the quality of her poetry and for the ideal that Smith, Anna Seward, and their generation cultivated: an elevated genius, a good heart, and an exalted mind. An anonymous tribute links Rowe and Carter in these terms: Such were the notes our chaster Sappho sung, / And every Muse dropped honey on her tongue and Such were the notes that struck the wond’ring ear / Of silent Night, when, on the verdant banks / Of Siloe’s hallow’d brook, celestial harps, / According to seraphic voices, sung.²⁷ Roger Lonsdale calls Carter the first widely cited inspirational example for women writers with serious literary ambitions in the second half of the century (Lonsdale, xxxi). Although Finch and Rowe led serious lives of the mind and were dedicated, aspiring poets, Carter and the decade of her Poems on Several Occasions (1762) inaugurate the period when women could claim poetry as a vocation and were praised for their contributions to their nation’s literary and cultural aspirations.

Working within these restrictions on the numbers of poets, I planned to analyze most of the major forms of eighteenth-century poetry, which I conceive, as Rosalie Colie did, to be families or literary kinds rather than traditional, largely classical genres. Topic, content, and mode are more often the unifying factors, as they are with the friendship and religious poems, than is structure, which governs the sonnet and to some extent the kinds of elegies I discuss.²⁸ By major I meant both respected, canonical kinds and the most popular forms—what poets within a decade were writing and publishers like Edward Cave and Robert Dodsley were selling. This was so ambitious as to be hallucinatory, and yet each of my chapters still deserves to be a book in itself. As my study developed, inevitably I was forced to delimit the range. For example, in the final revision I omitted eighteenth-century women’s metrical tales, although they are probably as important to the Romantic period as Smith’s sonnets have proved to be, and their intersections with the development of the novel, with growing class consciousness and tensions, and with recitation as a leisure activity haunt me. The space required to analyze the large categories of religious poetry and the friendship poem meant that less attention could be given to the ode, that consistently favorite form, or satire, that vexed form that becomes more vexed when women write it. Fortunately, however, both of these kinds have received serious attention from other critics. In all cases, I followed my principle of selecting the more neglected forms and concentrating on what has been previously overlooked, on women’s participation in poetic movements, and on distinctly gendered practices and uses I identified as central.

Although my book is organized around the forms in which women wrote, it is not intended to be a new history or to argue a progression toward, for instance, female poetic excellence or distinctly female forms of poetry. Nor have I forgotten that as conscious of genre as poets were, blending, mixing, and juxtaposing poetic kinds describe their actual composition. I trace changing fashions in poetry, and I try, chapter by chapter, to move through my list of noteworthy poets and to keep in mind generations of poets. Sometimes the achievement of an earlier woman dictated her inclusion in later chapters. At other times the woman’s publication history challenged a tidy chronology—Mary Whateley Darwall, for example, published her first book of poetry in 1764 and her second in 1794, while Anna Laetitia Barbauld published nearly continuously for fifty years. Because the number of women poets increases so dramatically in each quarter of the century, the coverage of the later decades is necessarily more selective. In short, I am admitting the vastness of my subject and that some idiosyncrasies surely resulted.

This book is not based on the paradigms of the old literary history. Rather it tests, interrogates, and occasionally uses them. Even had I wanted to, I could not force women into existing paradigms and systems from which they were excluded and whose values they continually questioned and still question. It was not enough to create a landscape that somehow mapped women onto it, as if they were tourist sites.²⁹ Who the poets were, what they wrote, how they interacted with one another and with the people and communities around them, and how poetry’s place in the culture encourages new paradigms and the beginning of a new, multidimensional literary history are my lines of inquiry. Barbara Lewalski points out that early women’s texts have been much too narrowly contextualized, and she blames the balkanized, heavily gendered scholarship of the present day. She writes that they are studied chiefly in relation to other women’s texts, or to modern feminist theory, or to some aspect of the period’s patriarchal ideology. Yet these texts urgently need to be read with the full scholarly apparatus of textual analysis, historical synthesis, and literary interpretation in play. … [and] brought to bear upon questions that have become central for literary scholars.³⁰ This kind of gender balkanization works both ways. Thus, I do not see or use men’s poetry as models or measures, and I begin with a chapter that argues that women were writing everything men were. Although I do not stop to contest the ubiquitous commonplaces about eighteenth-century women’s emulation of male poets and their lack of ambition, I would say about the women across the century what Betty Rizzo, Donna Landry, and Jennifer Keith have said of Mary Leapor: that rather than being imitators of male poets (Pope in Leapor’s case), they seem more often than not to contest them with both content and form. For instance, placing Pope’s Epistle to Burlington beside Leapor’s Crumble Hall reveals her own formal mastery as well as her different perspective and ideological critique. Even more significant, however, are the women who were not contesting a brother poet but developing independent strains within a form, as so many women writers of retirement poetry did.

The Chapters

This book is designed to lay a foundation for future study of eighteenth-century women poets, their poetry, and the literary histories to which they belong. Within each chapter’s exploration of a poetic kind a few women poets are featured. They were chosen for the representativeness, skill, and originality with which they practiced the form—what I judge to be their artistic excellence—and, in most cases, because they illustrate the kind of impact on a form that a woman or women made on the evolution of poetry in English. Also within each chapter is at least one sustained critical study of an especially interesting subgroup of poems, such as the formal verse apologeia in chapter 3, the thankful hymn on the recovery from illness in chapter 4, and the sonnet cycle in chapter 8. These analyses illustrate the diversity and originality of women’s work and also the critical opportunities their poetry offers. In a book dedicated to probing issues of agency, poems of self-assertion figure large, as does attention to how a woman might construct and live out a poetic career. This inquiry is foregrounded by the bookend chapters 2 and 8, the former organized around the poetry of Anne Finch and the latter centered on Charlotte Smith. In addition to their real and accepted superiority to most poets, these women illustrate admirably the range of poetry women wrote, how women constructed poetic careers and agency, and the changes from the beginning to the end of the century in poetic tastes and the acceptance of women poets.

Chapter 1, the introduction, contextualizes my study, first, through a description of ways poetry was read and appreciated in the eighteenth century and, second, in relation to some of today’s most absorbing issues. The next two chapters continue the discussion of the place of poetry in the culture and open the examination of what women were writing. Chapter 2 is organized around the popular poetic kinds, many traditionally associated with men. I include what we would call today popular culture types, such as occasional and theater verse, as well as the older forms that poets and the public of the time especially enjoyed, such as the pastoral dialogue and fables. Chapter 3 continues the survey of the kinds of poetry women wrote, with emphasis on the ways they were joining public debates with significance to them. The first of these chapters is anchored by the poetry of Anne Finch, Countess of Winchilsea, and the second by the poetry of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu and Elizabeth Singer Rowe. They and their verse are quite different and yet representative of their time, and in the eighteenth century all three were equally well known as personalities and poets.

Chapter 4 considers religious poetry. Although we have a great deal of sophisticated, literary criticism about such poetry from earlier centuries, the eighteenth century’s compositions are relatively neglected and often compartmentalized. After exploring paraphrases of scripture, the most commonly written form, and the hymn, perhaps the most familiar, I explore the two forms that women transformed or created: the narrative tale based on incidents in the Bible and devout soliloquies, a form invented by Elizabeth Singer Rowe. The narrative tales were dramatic renderings of biblical stories and may be the place where women made their most daring and outspoken statements about such things as the patriarchy, male bonding, and class relationships. The devout soliloquies weave personal experiences and interpretations into the set pieces of meditation (the goodness of God, hope of pardon, surrender to God). Rowe circulated hers among friends, contributing to a nearly unstudied part of manuscript culture. These early chapters are especially important in revealing highly original examples of coding. As in all subordinated cultures, women poets express ideas, beliefs, experiences, feelings and attitudes that the dominant culture—and perhaps even the dominated group—would find disturbing or threatening if expressed in more overt forms.³¹ These codes also draw the subordinated group together, forging them into a community recognized as such by its members. Although this result is expected with the friendship poem, religious poetry, surprisingly, rivals it in these respects.

Chapter 5 argues that the friendship poem, the form usually associated with Katherine Philips and assumed to be a mere antiquarian curiosity, came into its own in the eighteenth century and became a flexible, startlingly original and revisionary family of poems. Michel Foucault once wrote, I think now, after studying the history of sex, we should try to understand the history of friendship, or friendships. That history is very, very important.³² Like the study of religious poetry, however, attention to literary expressions of friendship declines as we enter the eighteenth century. An important and understudied form of life-writing, the friendship poem gives us access to women’s private or counter-universe and to new evidence about the ways literature can nurture independence, identity formation, and imaginative self-realization. By encouraging both a private, interiorized identity and a repertory of social selves that includes the political citizen, the friendship poem became a site from which to resist society’s increasing gendering pressures.

Chapters 6, 7, and 8 concentrate on three major forms of eighteenth-century poetry: retirement poems, elegies, and sonnets. All were popular types in the Renaissance and the seventeenth century, and many beautiful examples survive. Like the friendship poem, the retirement poem is often viewed as having faded, at the latest, early in the eighteenth century or having morphed into the melancholy graveyard poem. In women’s hands, however, the poem drew upon and departed from both the earlier and contemporary manifestations. This subject had much to offer women because retirement poems often represented a person without political or public power, even an exile from decision making, and they portrayed (or insisted upon with bravado) a hard-won, deeply virtuous, self-sufficient contentment. Women’s poems, however, are quite different; for example, the speaker is neither alone nor melancholy, and constructing a way of life is a different undertaking. These women poets intensified, broke with, and revised almost every defining characteristic, thereby raising the question of who identifies conventions and sets perimeters for inclusion in a literary genre. Yet by writing formal retirement poems they were buying into an aesthetic and an ideological model, one that was self-fashioning.³³ The eighteenth was actually a transitional century for the retirement poem, and women embraced the theme and subject, adapted it from what men were doing, and then passed it along greatly enriched.

Before the great male Romantic poets composed in them, women poets experimented with new forms and uses for the ode, the classical elegy, the sonnet, and the metrical tale, and women played a major part in the revival and revitalization of the last three. Chapter 7 explores various kinds of elegies, and chapter 8 the sonnet. These forms are now associated with the Romantic period, but women were working with them as early as the 1740s and deserve to have reintroduced into literary history their part in shaping them. Classical elegy seems to have come late to neoclassical study and adaptation, and women were leaders in this movement. Privileging some of its earliest themes and subjects, they found it an ideal form for considerations of the inseparability of the private and public. As with other poetic kinds, they both appreciated traditional stylistic and thematic conventions and broke with masculine preferences. In embracing Tibullus, whose elegies consistently juxtapose war and domestic bliss and whose circle included a woman poet, for instance, they turned away from Ovid’s miserable, deserted women in the Heroides. Women poets went far beyond the traditional forms to create revisionary poetry that they hoped would influence public opinion. Elegies are always about love as well as death, and the chapter concludes with a study of a set of poems on same-sex desire.

Chapter 8, the final chapter in this group begins with the sonnet, with special attention to Charlotte Smith, the poet now given credit for the sonnet revival. Placing her in a sketchy survey of sonnet writing by women and attempting to identify her particular contributions and influences, I read her as an eighteenth-century rather than a nineteenth-century, or pre-Romantic, poet. The rest of the chapter argues that the identification of a woman poet with a single form, regardless of how important and even predominating, falsifies, and therefore makes emphatic, that there is simply no substitute for comprehending a poet’s entire oeuvre. To locate Smith’s sonnets within her entire career produces a number of rather different readings while considerably developing the picture of her achievement and of the century’s poetic landscape. For example, through Smith and the other poets in this chapter, we see the triumph of the belief in the inseparability of sensibility and political consciousness³⁴ and Smith’s creative transfer of poetry into her novels and of narrative strategies into her poetry.

These chapters continue to test the hypothesis that women were important contributors to the project shared by most of the century’s poets, namely, to create distinctively English poetic forms, many obviously related to the classical forms with the most cultural capital but, they hoped, superior in their aesthetic qualities³⁵ and in their suitability for their modern world. As early as 1712, in Bernard Lintott’s important Miscellaneous Poems and Translations, John Gay wrote of translations, "And Homer’s Godlike Muse be made our own. Poets throughout the century continued to assert the importance of the project; Pope, for instance, in the Advertisement to Book 2, Epistle 1, To Augustus, wrote that he had made Horace’s Epistle to Augustus entirely English." Because they were not expected to know the classical verse forms, women could adapt them freely, and they were not as self-conscious in trying to create, for instance, an English pastoral or elegiac form and tradition that served their needs—as they did.

I conclude with an essay on two of the major issues regarding these women’s writing: how disabling their handicaps were and what the barriers are to giving these poets the same kinds of serious attention that women novelists and dramatists of the eighteenth century have received. The pressing questions do not seem to me to be those raised by the feminist critics, including myself, working with other genres, that is, what the historical, social, personal,³⁶ and ethical implications of excluding women from serious study and the canon are. Although I believe that there are serious consequences to neglecting these questions, I believe that the greater need is to understand the literary and aesthetic aspects. Ironically, because so little work has been done on the women poets, my book offers a markedly different, almost inverse, approach to reconstructing a literary landscape from that carried out by the critics and scholars who have remapped novel history. Specifically, rather than working from isolated examinations of individual writers, one by one, only to see them rise and fall and never become either sufficiently integrated into literary history or fixed in the canon (as Charlotte Lennox’s Female Quixote seems to have done), I consider entire poetic kinds as practiced throughout the century. This approach may yield a better sense of the cost to literary history of omitting women writers and offer a more reliable way to answer the question that bedevils feminist critics: Who is worthy of remembrance?

This prologue began with two quotations. Allen Tate lays down the challenge to critics that I have accepted. His is also a challenge to these long-dead women writers. I offer the renewal of understanding, but whether the poetry can live again in our critical sensibilities will be resolved by readers. The great Russian formalist Boris Éjxenbaum reminds us to study literature as a social form and as an evolutionary process from which new and adapted genres come. In spite of my reluctance to write a new literary history, the poetry women composed, the traditions they transmit and alter, the genres they transform, the changing society in which different generations lived, and the space and identity they claimed by the end of the century assert a history and a powerful story of evolution. Startling expressions of humor, anger, sarcasm, elation, grief, contentment, ambition, sympathy, and playfulness abound in the poetry explored in my book, and the evolution of women’s poetry, with its inevitable impact on literary history, begins to make itself apparent.

Many of the women poets in my book will be unfamiliar, in some cases perhaps unknown, even to specialists in the fields of women’s studies and eighteenth-century poetry. In order to reduce confusion, I consistently use the name of the poet at the time of her death and spell names as they are given in Janet Todd’s Dictionary of British and American Women Writers, 1660–1800. I recognize uncertainties about, for instance, whether Mary is best styled Monk or Monck (Lonsdale, 70) and awkwardnesses in the cases of some poets, like Sarah Fyge Egerton and Mary Whateley Darwall, who published significant work under both their maiden and married names. Brief biographies precede the Notes.

I have used Poet and Poetry as cultural-studies critics do Culture to signal a distinction between, on the one hand, ordinary, real poets and their poetry and, on the other, high art and the traditional, indeed ancient, aspirations, social functions, and calling that are associated with writing in this genre. I use poetry by women and women’s poetry interchangeably; in this book I am not considering poetry written specifically for women as a category of production. Finally, the guidelines in The Chicago Manual of Style, 15th edition, have been followed in quotations, and as recommended, all titles of poems are italicized.

Eighteenth-Century Women Poets and Their Poetry

CHAPTER ONE

Introduction

I’d sooner lead a dancing bear,

Than bow my neck to Fashion’s yoke.

— ELIZA TUITE

The eighteenth century was a time of tumult and revolutionary change in the public and private spheres. Scarred at the beginning by the Interregnum, regicide, and the Glorious Revolution, it concluded with the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars. The British learned to justify empire building, a parliamentary monarchy, and the transportation of its citizens to America and Australia. The War of the Spanish Succession made Britain the major slaving nation, the battle of Plassey and the Seven Years’ War confirmed its imperialist identity, and the American War of Independence humbled it; all tested the nation’s sense of itself, especially as the premier example of liberty. In the first half of the century the British Empire was essentially an Atlantic one, but by 1815 the whole of eastern India, most of the peninsula and a large part of the Ganges valley, the coast of Ceylon, and the island of Mauritius belonged to Great Britain.¹ The Jacobite rebellions, the Sacheverell, Wilkite, and Gordon riots, and the proliferation of political societies and associations are but signs of ideological battles and the costs of change. Crime, homelessness, and poverty rose, and controversies over who should be educated to what extent and in what manner flared through the century. The middle classes and even the poor became increasingly politicized, historians agree,² and sustained debates about the nature and rights of people of various classes and ethnicities inflected discourses about the sexes.

In spite of these forces, much was stable, including the centrality of the monarchy and the Protestant religion, control of Parliament and the courts by the landed elite, and faith in the constitution. Although manufacturing, commerce, and international trade accelerated, Britain was still largely a rural, agrarian society. Patriarchy remained the ideology of the state and the family, and even such shifts as from dower to strict settlement and jointure tended to strengthen it.³ The British continued to see themselves as a benevolent people, and as the parish charity system proved inadequate, foundling and lying-in hospitals were established. Another constant was war: only brief periods were free of it. The war years were 1702–13, 1715 (the Jacobite Rebellion), 1718–29, 1739–48, 1756–63, 1775–83, and 1793–1815.

Just as these events and issues were the subjects of poems by men, so they were for women, and even when they are not central, traces of them tint men’s and women’s writings and their texts’ public reception. In a nation aspiring to superiority in arts and arms and for whom the metaphor of the ideal state was grounded in an image of marriage and the relationship between man and woman, poetry, its content, and its composers were of national significance.

Changing Contexts

Although it hardly needs to be said, the material circumstances in which poetry was composed and read in the eighteenth century were so different as to be alien to us today. Even pronunciation has changed, and lines that seem gratingly inept would have rhymed and scanned in their day. For instance, er was often pronounced ar, and supreme rhymed with fame; words borrowed from French retained more of the French pronunciation. Taste, which often seems bewildering or astonishing, helped dictate both the purposes of poetry and its aesthetic standards. Critics deplore the rage for Pindarics and later for Shen-stone that seduced poets and ruined their promise, but at the height of each imitative craze people believed important and beautiful elements were being added to British verse. We may never fully understand why Frances Greville’s Prayer for Indifference (1759), an excellent poem that Lonsdale identifies as the most celebrated poem by a woman in the period, was so overwhelmingly popular,⁴ but we can come to understand the way a genre functions in a culture in numerous, important, revisionary ways.

Above all, poetry in the eighteenth century was written for more reasons than we can imagine. Much of it was written without high literary ambitions, and its purposes would render the use of the codes of prestige poetry ridiculous. In the first half of the century both men and women came to be expected to be able to create graceful extempore poems at social events and for every occasion—even a dinner invitation. More and more poetry was written to be social communication or entertainment, as songs and anagrams were, or as a display of wit, social grace, or accomplishment. At the same time, poetry never ceased to be editorial and propaganda. It even performed some of the same work as had periodicals, beginning with the Tatler and the Spectator. For example, poetry taught the middle classes how to dress, how to participate in fashionable activities, and how to age gracefully, as did Ann Murry’s The Card Party, A Town Eclogue, Clara Reeve’s To a Coquet, Disappointed of a Party of Pleasure, and Anne Finch’s Clarinda’s Indifference at Parting with Her Beauty.

By the middle of the century poets worked in an almost entirely different world. Periodicals and then anthologies became major popularizers of poetry and poets. Publication became increasingly easy, and these periodicals carefully framed poetry by women in a discourse of gratitude and respect for their talents and gender. Edward Cave’s Gentleman’s Magazine printed eight pages with two columns of poetry in selected issues in 1733 and in all issues beginning in 1735. His poetry contests were popular with women, and Jane Brereton, for instance, found a reliable venue for her poetry with Cave. Miscellanies, anthologies, and collections of poems became the most profitable ways to sell poetry, and these kinds of books, especially Robert Dodsley’s, rode the cultural obsession with developing and displaying taste.⁵ By 1745 there were thirty periodical journals, and although some were short-lived, more appeared regularly.⁶

In this new print-rich world, publishers created a need for the review of almost every book published. As Antonia Forster says, The most remarkable aspect of the establishment of the early general review journals is the rapidity with which readers appear to have been brought to accept the argument that such a publication is something ‘which no one, conversant in the Literary World, ought, in justice to themselves, to be without.’⁷ These journals gave generous space to poetry and made clear the benefits of reading poetry by women. Reviews of Barbauld’s 1773 Poems were, for instance, overwhelmingly favorable, and Richard Terry offers solid evidence that women’s writing seems to be given especially rapid advancement in the third quarter of the eighteenth century.⁸ Booksellers beginning with the Interregnum generation of Humphrey Moseley had developed consumer demand and begun identifying specific markets for kinds of books. As early as 1685, people noted a fashion for poetry by women, and a century later that demand would be met in a variety of ways.⁹

After 1780, publishers made sure that readers knew, for instance, that their paper, magazine, or collection included the latest or most discussed poem by Smith or Seward, and Robinson’s work fed on periodical opportunities. People felt that they needed to read poems fresh from the press, as well as the classics, which had come to include the national poets, Spenser, Milton, and Pope.¹⁰ Anthologies for women routinely offered both, as Oliver Goldsmith’s Poems for Young Ladies in Three Parts: Devotional, Moral, and Entertaining (1767) included poems by Addison, Parnell, Waller, Collins, and Dryden, along with The parting of Hector and Andromache from the Iliad, the death of Dido from the Aeneid, and the Story of Narcissus from Ovid.

Provincial subscription publishing, another revolution in the book trade, made access to print even easier. The citizens of Plymouth supported both of Ann Thomas’s publications (a novel and Poems on Various Subjects, 1784), and the local gentry and circles of friends and supporters from Coventry and the Rugby School were the subscribers to Elizabeth Hands’s The Death of Amnon … With An Appendix: Containing Pastorals, and other Poetical Pieces (1789). Ann Messenger describes young men bustling around the [Oxford] colleges, persuading their friends to subscribe to Mary Whateley [Darwall]’s Original Poems on Several Occasions.¹¹ In fact, subscription publication moved away from the prestige and nationalistic subsidies that Defoe’s Caledonia and Pope’s translations had attracted to subscription as a form of charity for those deemed worthy, as the two thousand subscribers for Poems on Various Subjects by Jane Cave Winscom illustrate.¹²

The history of women’s writing is one of tolerance and flowering followed, apparently inevitably, by constriction and repression. The eighteenth century, however, shows a remarkably consistent, hospitable atmosphere for women poets. When John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, wrote A Letter from Artemesia in the Town to Chloe in the Country, he was expressing an attitude that the contemporaries of women writing after 1730 could scorn and that both men and women labeled prejudice: Cursed if you fail, and scorned though you succeed! Mary Masters published her first volume of poetry as Poems on Several Occasions. By a Young Gentleman in 1724, but the 1733 edition proudly bore her name. A good marker for the change is the contrast between Anne Killigrew’s Upon the Saying That My Verses Were Made by Another (1686) and Masters’s To a Gentleman who questioned my being the Author of the foregoing Verses. Killigrew’s poem begins with the history of her prayer to the Queen of Verse and the response to publication: What ought t’have brought me honour, brought me shame! / Like Aesop’s painted jay I seem’d to all, / Adorned in plumes I not my own could call. The poem ends, I willingly accept Cassandra’s fate, / To speak the truth, although believ’d too late (Fullard, 21–22). Masters’s poem, with its irreverent, mock humility, is a dramatic contrast: A Genius may supply the Pedant’s Art. / Hence ’tis, that I, unletter’d Maid, pretend / To paraphrase a Psalm, or praise a Friend; / … / Nature’s strong Impulse gives my Fancy Wings. Both women insist, as Masters says, that the Poem, howsoe’er design’d, / Is a true Picture of the Author’s Mind. Killigrew uses as her example Orinda, but Masters uses herself as the example and ends with the comic proof: You’ll plainly see, in almost ev’ry Line, / Distinguishing Defects to prove them Mine.¹³ She dares to joke and can assume that her readers know more women poets than Killigrew could. Her attitude is cheeky, a strong contrast to Killigrew’s disappointment and carefully veiled outrage and plea for fair play. Killigrew’s poem is also highly polished; her smooth heroic couplets are filled with classical allusions. Masters also uses heroic couplets, but her language is simple and vernacular with occasional references to poetic diction, as when she asserts that she has the right to sing of flow’ry Meadow, or a purling Stream.

The widespread public acceptance of women as poets grew rapidly. Thomas Seward’s The Female Right to Literature (1748) was praised and frequently reprinted, and John Duncombe’s The Feminiad. A Poem was published as a monograph in 1754 and reprinted in such highly visible places as Dodsley’s Collections and The Lady’s Poetical Magazine (1782). A 1761 review of Carter’s Poems on Several Occasions began: "There never was perhaps an age wherein the fair sex made so conspicuous a figure with regard to literary accomplishments as in our own. We may all remember the time, when a woman who could spell was looked on as an extraordinary phenomenon, and a reading and writing wife was considered as a miracle; but the case at present is quite otherwise. Learning is now grown so fashionable among all the ladies."¹⁴ Both Duncombe and this reviewer treated the women as sources of national pride. Even though the debate over whether women should learn and write had become one over what they should learn and write, by the 1780s it was a commonplace that England took pride in the large number of female authors … possessed of such indisputable merit and believed that women’s learning might be a source of national pride.¹⁵

Although poetry by women from the earliest times survives, Katherine Philips and Aphra Behn made poetry seem an endeavor possible for middle-class women. In George Colman and Bonnell Thornton’s Poems by Eminent Ladies, the collection that began to set the canon of women’s poetry, Behn, then acknowledged to be an excellent poet, was given the most space and represented by twenty-seven poems, and Philips by eleven. Often cast as polar opposites, the two women were more alike in their literary aspirations than they were different. Philips’s poetry evoked Simone de Beauvoir’s counteruniverse of female friendship and private-sphere pleasures, while Behn’s poetry, although often set unabashedly in public-sphere debates, also celebrates the pleasures of the private. Behn’s poetry was praised for its quality; she was depicted by Daniel Defoe in The Pacificator (1700) as one of the great poets welcoming John Dryden to Heaven. She had been invited by men, including Dryden, to contribute to prestigious commercial poetic ventures, yet she also wrote many pastoral and friendship poems. Philips had published two plays and been the first woman to have a play produced on the Dublin and London stages (Pompey in February 1663 and January 1664, respectively). She died while preparing a volume of her poetry for publication,¹⁶ and Aphra Behn was known for the attitude she expressed in her challenging lines, What has poor Woman done that she must be, / Debar’d from Sense and Sacred Poetrie.¹⁷ Both had gained access to publication and production through powerful men who were influential in the theatrical and political worlds. Both engaged their world, in Kathleen Swaim’s description of Philips, rewriting the experience that power and history have written upon them. In a quite deliberate choice, they positioned themselves both personally and politically.¹⁸

By the end of