Victorian Poetry

The Victorian poetess

leads off with Procter's poem "A Woman's Question" (1858), and proceeds
to intersperse works by male and female writers, although the former
considerably outweigh the latter. Wood's preface makes no issue of gender;
there is one passing reference to "poets of my own sex." 43 Increasingly,
critics were treating male and female poets side by side or categorizing
them together in critical discussions, as in H. Buxton Forman's Our Living
Poets (1871). There were of course those who defended the old terrain,
most notably Eric S. Robertson's English Poetesses: A Series of Critical
Biographies with Illustrative Extracts (1883). He asserts that "women have
always been inferior to men as writers of poetry; and they always will be,"
since "children are the best poems Providence meant women to produce." 44
But Robertson seems to protest too much. He was influential for later
critics who found in him an ally for excluding women writers from the
canon. Read in the context of other anthologies and women's poetry of the
time, however, his polemic seems outmoded. Elizabeth Sharp's Women
Poets of the Victorian Era (1890) reflects the mood of the previous two
decades of women's poetry more accurately. Sharp dedicates her volume to
the New Woman novelist Mona Caird, "the most loyal and devoted
advocate of the cause of woman," and her preface broaches her material
with a sense of confidence: "The scope of the volume covers... practically
new ground. I do not think that the poetry enshrined herein requires any
apology from me or from any one: it speaks for itself." In language that
links her project with Caird's, she asserts that the collection

arose primarily from the conviction that our women-poets had never been

collectively represented with anything like adequate justice; that the works of

many are not so widely known as they deserved to be; and that at least some

fine fugitive poetry could be rescued from oblivion. Women have had many

serious hindrances to contend against - defective education, lack of broad

experience of life, absence of freedom in which to make full use of natural

abilities, and the force of public and private opinion, both of which have

always been prone to prejudice their work unfavourably, or at best apolo-

getically. 45

Sharp's analysis stands up well today, and her selection of poets mirrors
almost uncannily that of anthologies which have more recently engaged in
the project of rescuing the still fugitive poetry by Victorian women from
oblivion.
This new poetess, rather like her fictional counterpart the New Woman,
ushered in experimentation in both content and form. The old one lingered,
and her imprint can be found in critical and poetic discourse into the next
century. But now the cultural dilemmas posed by female cultural produc-
tion seemed less pressing, to women poets at least. The feminist movement

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