SUSAN BROWNEdgar Allan Poe, having argued that "Beauty is the sole legitimate province
of the poem," notoriously observed that "the death ... of a beautiful
woman is, unquestionably, the most poetical topic in the world." 6 But if
Poe's remark threatens to make femicide (of a textual kind) an aesthetic
criterion, the image of the dead or dying woman provided many women
writers with a model for thinking about what it meant to exist as a poetess
in the nineteenth century. In what follows, I consider how both women
poets and male critics adopted differing perspectives on the mortified body
of the poetess. Thereafter, I examine how this ideal resulted in part from
the domestic ideology that solidified in the decade when Victoria ascended
the throne, and consider how a number of women writers reconfigured the
identity of the poetess in light of the kind of feminist campaigns that the
Langham Place group was the first to mobilize.
IISappho is a figure whose death provides a source of inspiration and despair
for women writers throughout the nineteenth century. Indeed, Yopie Prins
finds that "Sappho emerges as the proper name for the Poetess" in Victorian
England. 7 Both the putative life and the fragmentary works of this sixth-
century BC Greek writer - the most prominent woman of the classical poets
and the acknowledged head of the lyric tradition - powerfully inflect
countless representations of the Victorian poetess as an abandoned
woman. 8 Until the 1880s, women poets read Sappho in the biographical
tradition promulgated largely by Ovid's Heroides, which emphasized her
suicidal leap from the Leucadian cliff after her male lover Phaon aban-
doned her. (Only when Swinburne published "Anactoria" in 1866 did
Sappho's lesbian desires become fully legible in English poetry.) Sappho's
suicide became an allegory for women poets' dilemmas and an alibi for
their voices: it focused their sense of the conflicts between art and love,
vocation and gender, and the desire for literary fame and the demands of
social convention. Sappho's last song is virtually a fixture in pre- and early
Victorian women's writing.
Felicia Hemans - a Romantic poet who posthumously became the most
popular woman poet of the Victorian period - explicitly connects Sappho's
plight to her femininity. Hemans remarked of a statue depicting the poet
newly deserted by her lover: "There is a sort of willowy drooping in the
figure, which seems to express a weight of unutterable sadness, and one
sinking arm holds the lyre so carelessly, that you almost fancy it will drop
while you gaze. Altogether, it seems to speak piercingly and sorrowfully of
the nothingness of Fame, at least to woman." 9 These remarks reveal how
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