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"