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.