Victorian Poetry

SUSAN BROWN

marker of the vexed relationship between highly naturalized constructions
of femininity, new modes of production, and changing patterns of cultural
consumption. In this distant day, we can now see more clearly the local
strategies that nineteenth-century women employed to negotiate - and on
occasion shift - the discursive and material practices that would otherwise
make a mortified body of a "breathing poetess."

NOTES

I would like to thank Christine Bold, Linda Mahood, Donna Pennee, and Ann
Wilson, for reading an early draft of this essay, and Joseph Bristow for editorial
midwifery beyond the call of duty.
1 [Anonymous,] "To a Poetess" (Privately Printed, 1856), 7.
2 Isobel Armstrong, Victorian Poetry: Poetry, Poetics and Politics (London:
Routledge, 1993), 321.
3 Stuart Curran, "Women Readers, Women Writers," in The Cambridge Compa-
nion to Romanticism, ed. Curran (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1993), 193-
4 [Anonymous,] "The Female Character," Fraser's Magazine 7 (1833), 601.
5 Sarah Stickney Ellis, The Daughters of England: Their Position in Society,
Character, and Responsibilities ([1837] New York: D. Appleton, 1842), 98.
6 Edgar Allan Poe, "The Philosophy of Composition," in Selections from the
Critical Writings of Edgar Allan Poe, ed. EC. Prescott (New York: Gordian
Press, 1981), 156, 158.
7 Yopie Prins, Victorian Sappho (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press,
T-999), 14-
8 Lawrence Lipking, Abandoned Women and Poetic Tradition (Chicago, IL:
University of Chicago Press, 1988).
9 Felicia Hemans, Undated Letter, Correspondent Unknown, cited in [Harriett
Hughes,] "Memoir of the Life and Writings of Mrs. Hemans by Her Sister," in
The Works of Mrs. Hemans, 7 vols. (Edinburgh: William Blackwood and Sons,
1839), I, 226.
10 Marlon B. Ross, The Contours of Masculine Desire: Romanticism and the Rise
of Women's Poetry (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), 298.
II Laman Blanchard, Life and Literary Remains of L.E.L., 2 vols. (London:
H. Colburn, 1841),!, 38.
12 Tricia Lootens, Lost Saints: Silence, Gender, and Victorian Literary Canoniza-
tion (Charlottesville, VA: University Press of Virginia, 1996), 49-50.
13 Angela Leighton, Victorian Women Poets: Writing Against the Heart (Charlot-
tesville, VA: University Press of Virginia, 1992), 67.
14 Virginia Blain, "Letitia Elizabeth Landon, Eliza Mary Hamilton, and the
Genealogy of the Victorian Poetess," Victorian Poetry 33 (1995), 31-51.
15 [Edward Bulwer-Lytton,] Review of L.E.L., Romance and Reality, New
Monthly Magazine 32 (1831), 546.
16 William Maginn, "Gallery of Literary Characters XLI: Miss Landon," Fraser's
Magazine 8 (1833), 433.