Victorian Poetry

9

SUSAN BROWN

The Victorian poetess

i

Thou hast given

Thyself to Time and to the world. Thy strains

In many a distant day, and many a clime,

Shall be thy living voice - nay, not that voice;

But the soul's voice, the breathing poetess.

• [Anonymous,] "To a Poetess" (1856) 1

This tribute "To a Poetess" may seem a perverse note on which to begin
this chapter, not least because the poem was most probably written by a
member of the Langham Place group: the first identifiably feminist organi-
zation to promote women's rights in England. Why would a feminist writer
praise the figure of the poetess? After all, the very word poetess has for
most of the twentieth century sounded unequivocally patronizing. As the
feminized form of poet (a word that can sound gender-neutral), poetess
suggests not the difference in degree implied by a modifier like "woman"
but the absolute difference in kind implied by separate nouns. Despite the
negative connotations that the term eventually acquired, it is worth
remembering that it would be hard for Victorians to grasp the extent to
which "poetess" sounds unnecessarily gendered to us. As Isobel Armstrong
asserts: "It is probably no exaggeration to say that an account of women's
writing as occupying a particular sphere of influence, and as working inside
defined moral and religious conventions, helped to make women's poetry
and the 'poetess'... respected in the nineteenth century as they never have
been since." 2 In other words, the mark of gender was not necessarily
uniformly oppressive for Victorian women. Poetess, although occasionally
used interchangeably with "woman poet," was generally the preferred
term, and as such it proved enabling as well as constraining for women
writers in its insistence that masculinity and femininity mattered where
poetry was concerned. It is misleading to suggest, as Stuart Curran does,

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