Leighton 1992

Leighton, Angela. Victorian Women Poets: Writing Against the Heart. New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1992. Print.

Introduction

• 1 intervention: redressing the imbalance to that point of women's writing being addressed as the novel, not poetry as distinct, the "precedent of exclusion"
• Yet women's poetry of the C19, much more than the novel, was written and read as part of a self-consciously female tradition.
• 2 ...the women poet as a self-professed, rather than just self-supporting, writer, appears, almost for the first time in history, in the post-Romantic decades of the 1820s and 30s. The mystique of the woman poet which develops at this time, partly as a response to the economic expansion of the literary market, offers to subsequent generations of women both an enthusiastic incentive to write and a subtly determining myth of what being a woman poet means.
• 3 I would argue that its [Victorian women's poetry's] spirit is essentially different from either [Romanticism or Modernism], in that it constantly sets women's imaginative experience at cross purposes with social and sexual morality. Such a cross is, in a sense, of the essence of the Victorian imagination, as well as being the especially burdensome anxiety of the Victorian woman writer.
• Victorian women's poetry, I argue, grows out of a struggle with and against a highly moralised celebration of women's sensibility.
  • sensibility: the ability to appreciate and respond to complex emotional or aesthetic influences; sensitivity; (M-W); "The quality of being readily and strongly affected by emotional or artistic influences and experiences; emotional awareness; susceptibility or sensitivity to, keen awareness of." (OED)
  • "the ideal of creative but suffering femininity which is of the essence of sensibility" (3)
• The exclusion of money, sex, power and, as it were, imaginative insensiblity from the poetic consciousness of women then becomes part of a more general, moral protection campaign of Victorian womanhood. This dissociation of sensibility from the affairs of the world - a dissociation already decried in the later works of Mary Wollstonecraft - is one of the woman poet's most disabling inheritances. The attempt to overcome the dissociation by writing not from, but against the heart, is an ambition which, although taking different forms, connects all these poets who follow in the wake of Hemans and LEL. Without the heart to guarantee femininity, feeling and truth, the imagination enters a world of skeptically disordered moral and linguistic reference.
• 6 Both outwardly referential and documentational and also inwardly self-referring and self-enjoying, the literary text is poised between opposite commitments of sense.
• 7 Between the biographical-historical matter of my chapters and the formalist-aesthetic interpretations of the poems there is a tension which is itself, implicitly, the literary argument of this book.

Felicia Hemans

• 8 in Wordsworth's remembrance in "Extempore Effusion upon the Death of James Hogg" (1835), "she is holy and sweet, less a woman than a spirit, less a poet than a saint."
• 9 Not only did [this self-projection as Holy and Sweet] help to resuce the profession of writing from the scandals still associated with the names of Aphra Behn and Mary Wollstonecraft, but it also helped to promote, however apologetically, a seductively self-realizing and self-admiring figure of the woman poet.
• 10 [after her husband ran off to Rome] Felicia lived for the rest of her life as a separated woma - an unconventional, if not scandalous situation which, perhaps more than anything else, accounts for the sweet and holy attitude she cultivated so assiduously.
• She wrote fast and apparently effortlessly, with a good eye to the market of annuals and pocket books which increasingly, during the 1820s and 30s, answered to the demand of a new, distinctly female readership. Between 1817, when The Literary Gazette was founded, and 1857, which saw the last issue of The Keepsake, these expensively bound and lavishly illustrated volumes flourished. They supplied the need for a purely literary and popular magazine, free from the political rancours of the main journals, and containing a light, readable mixture of poets, stories, letters and fashionable chit-chat.
  • this is the type of thing Eliot makes fun of Rosamund for reading in Middlemarch and which Price 2000 says Eliot worried about with anthologized forms of her own work
• 11 "Evening Prayers at a Girls' School" advises its readers, all girls themselves, to accept the 'lot' of womanhood with willing, if gloomy, zeal.
• 12 The tone of exhortatory melancholy captures a potent combination of resilience and weariness, heroism and victimization, importance and hopelessness in its female audience.
  • cf. "Casabianca"
• 13 making the point that by the end of the century she was no longer really read and appreciated by poets, but still very much so by readers
  • "As Amy Cruse notes: 'Every young lady had a [14] copy of her poems, and in every schoolroom they were read and learnt by heart.'"

Letitia Elizabeth Landon

• 46 In a few years [at the beginning of her career] she was one of the most sought-after names in the annuals.
• 49 Between 1821 and 1930, LEL published six volumes of poetry. In addition, she undertook vast quantities of casual writing and editorial work for the new literary magazines. These were the years in which the annuals flourished, reaching some two hundred in number in the 1830s, and the name of LEL became one of their strongest selling points. For all the scorn that they provoked, the annuals could afford to pay their authors high fees, and for example, neither Scott, Southey, Moore, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Landor, Lamb, Hood, Tennyson nor Ruskin were above contributing to them.
• 50 But although this picturesque mode encouraged the writing of minutely specific melodramas of love, despair and death, the reality of writing for the annuals was far from dilettantish. Very often it required hard-headed composition to strict deadlines and, in the case of editors, both a huge correspondence with no secretarial ehlp and an obligation to make up for any shortfuall with their own works.
• ...it was LEL's fate as a poet to depend for her very survival on the financial benefits of the popular press.
• striking: of the 8 in this book (Hemans, LEL, Barrett Browning, Rossetti, Webster, Field, Meynell, Mew), only Hemans and LEL had to write for a living.
• 54 she was engaged to John Forster in the 1830s but broke it off because of her bad reputation
• 57 Yet as a poet, LEL represents an advance on Hemans. She is less pious, less bound in a 'satin riband' of right thinking, less dogmatically sweet... LEL was not an original poet, but she was, in the end, one who repudiated the high style of exotic melancholia which was the ley to her easy, short-lived success, and who eventually faced her own artistic failings with an honesty which is unsoftened by religious or romantic sentiment.

Context: Corinne

From Sarah: "It’s about a young single woman celebrated for her poetic ability. She’s the foremost celebrity in Rome. A young Scotsman heats her and falls in love. They court. She’s too genius and free for his expectations of female decorum. The rest is spoilers. But the most important things are that Corinne is genius, free, independent, and perfect."