SUSAN BROWNcontinued to gather steam. It drove home its analysis of the implication of
gender politics in exchange and commodification through its critiques of
marriage, the regulation of prostitution, and the nation's legal, educational,
and political structures, even as it demonstrated the ability of women to
thrive beyond the home in the public sphere. The remarkable shifts in tone
and the startling variety of theme, form, and technique in the texts of late-
Victorian women poets such as Mathilde Blind, Mary Coleridge, Amy
Levy, Constance Naden, and A. Mary F. Robinson may be due to a sense
that women no longer need define themselves against the figure of the
poetess. In this respect, these accomplished poets had considerably out-
stripped critics such as Robertson. To be sure, gender often remained an
issue for women poets, but understandings of masculinity and femininity
had transformed considerably since the dawn of the Victorian era.
Immense changes in the publishing industry likewise had an impact on
how and where women published, s o that the precious limited editions of
Michael Field are a result of changing material practices as well as a shift in
aesthetics. In underwriting the cost of literary productions, the aunt and
niece who wrote jointly as Michael Field retained a large measure of editorial
control over their material. Such control was possibly a necessity, given that
even the sympathetic Robert Browning appears from the manuscript of
Long Ago, their frankly "audacious" completion of Sappho's fragments, 46 to
have counseled the excision of more explicit lesbian love poetry. Yet the
gorgeous production values of their books, which present themselves as
aesthetic objects, hearken back to the annuals. Their sense of elitism,
exclusivity, and sheer decorativeness recalls women's role in conservative
gender ideology as the "perfume" - to invoke Barrett Browning's words - in
men's homes. It uncomfortably suggests a parallel between the commodified
form in which women represent themselves and the commodification of
women themselves. To have behind them a century of successful female
poets gave women new confidence as cultural producers, but the structures
of aesthetic commodification remained heavily gendered.
Such structures fostered the continuing devaluation of the Victorian
poetess. Only in the 1990s have many feminist critics begun to consider
women poets other than Rossetti, Barrett Browning, and Emily Bronte.
Their research has questioned the standards of value and literary inquiry
that placed Hemans - the most popular woman poet of the nineteenth
century - beyond the critical pale for almost a hundred years.
Few scholars would now dispute the historical and sociological interest
of the poetess as a significant phenomenon in the early nineteenth century.
But critics remain divided on questions of literary value. Some find a real
complexity in their works. Glennis Stephenson discovers in L.E.L.'s large
198