WOMEN'S POETRY IN THE ENLIGHTENMENT Also by Isobel Armstrong ARTHUR HUGH CLOUGH ROBERT BROWNING: Writers and their Background (editor) THE MAJOR VICTORIAN POETS: Reconsiderations (editor) MANSFIELD PARK: Penguin Critical Studies NINETEENTH-CENTURY WOMEN POETS: An Oxford Anthology (co-edited by Joseph Bristow, with Cath Sharrock) SENSE AND SENSIBILITY: Penguin Critical Studies VICTORIAN SCRUTINIES: Reviews of Poetry, 1830-1870 VICTORIAN POETRY: Poetry, Poetics and Politics Also by Virginia Blain THE FEMINIST COMPANION TO LITERATURE IN ENGLISH Women's Writing from the Middle Ages to the Present CAROLINE BOWLES SOUTHEY: The Making of a Woman Writer Also edited by Isobel Armstrong and Virginia Blain WOMEN'S POETRY, LATE ROMANTIC TO LATE VICTORIAN Gender and Genre,1830-1900 Wotnen's Poetry in the Enlighten111ent The Making of a Canon, 1730-1820 Edited by Isobel Armstrong Professor of English Birkbeck College University of London and Virginia Blain Associate Professor of English Macquarie University Sydney in association with Palgrave Macmillan First published in Great Britain 1999 by MACMILLAN PRESS LTD Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS and London Companies and representatives throughout the world A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN 978-1-349-27026-2 ISBN 978-1-349-27024-8 (eBook) DOI 10.1007/978-1-349-27024-8 First published in the United States of America 1999 by ST. MARTIN'S PRESS, INC., Scholarly and Reference Division, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010 ISBN 978-0-333-69151-9 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Women's poetry in the Enlightenment: the making of a canon, 1730-1820 I edited by Isobel Armstrong and Virginia Blain. p. ern. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-333-69151-9 (cloth) 1. English poetry-Women authors-History and criticism. 2. Women and literature-Great Britain-History-18th century. 3. Women and literature-Great Britain-History-19th century. 4. English poetry-18th century-History and criticism. 5. English poetry-19th century-History and criticism. 6. Enlightenment -Great Britain. 7. Canon (Literature) I. Armstrong, Isobel. II. Blain, Virginia, 1945- PR555.W6W66 1998 821'.5099287-dc21 97-42321 CIP Selection and editorial matter © Isobel Armstrong and Virginia Blain 1999 Text © Macmillan Press Ltd 1999 Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 1999 978-0-333-69151-9 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London W1P 9HE. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The authors have asserted their rights to be identified as the authors of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. 10987654321 08 07 06 05 04 03 02 01 00 99 Contents Preface vii Isobel Armstrong and Virginia Blain Notes on the Contributors xiii Part I The Sensuous Eighteenth Century: 1 Minds and Bodies 1 Sensuousness in the Poetry of Eighteenth-Century Women Poets 3 Margaret Anne Doody 2 'All Passion Extinguish' d': The Case of Mary Chandler, 1687-1745 33 David Shuttleton 3 'A Dialogue': Elizabeth Carter's Passion for the Female Mind 50 Lisa A. Freeman Part II The Feminist Political Project 65 4 Mary Seymour Montague: Anonymity and 'Old Satyrical Codes' 67 Isobel Grundy 5 The Female Poet and the Poetess: Two Traditions of British Women's Poetry, 1780-1830 81 Anne K. Mellor 6 The Politics of Vision: Anna Barbauld's 'Eighteen Hundred and Eleven' 99 Maggie Favretti v vi Contents Part III Protest and Patronage 111 7 'This Muse-born Wonder': the Occluded Voice of Ann Yearsley, Milkwoman and Poet of Clifton 113 Mary Waldron 8 The Maid and the Minister's Wife: literary Philanthropy in Regency York 127 Roger Sales Part IV Remaking Genres and Subjectivities 143 9 Romantic Women Poets: Inscribing the Self 145 Stuart Curran 10 Homosocial Women: Martha Sansom, Constantia Grierson, Mary Leapor and Georgie Verse Epistle 167 Kate Lilley 11 Charlotte Smith's Elegiac Sonnets: Losses and Gains 184 Judith Hawley Part V Finale: A Female Canon? 199 12 Fashioning a Female Canon: Eighteenth-Century Women Poets and the Politics of the Anthology 201 Elizabeth Eger Index 216 Preface '[S]ome essential work has been done - the spade-work-of locat ing poets, finding their publications and manuscripts, and giv ing a coherent account of their individual lives', Margaret Anne Doody announces at the beginning of the first essay in this vol ume. The essays on women's poetry of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries presented here have a context in the steady work of republication, editing and anthologizing which has gone on in the past decade or so. That work, initiated by Roger Lonsdale's splendid Oxford anthology of eighteenth-century women poets in 1989, continues and will continue. Its inevitable consequence, however, is a further stage of critical investigation as new questions emerge. Some of these questions are voiced by Stuart Curran in another essay in this volume: What new mod els of literary history must be constructed as women's poetry is rediscovered? How do we prevent ourselves from assimilating women merely to a 'paradigm drawn up and enacted by men' and arrive at a model which genuinely reconfigures literary, in tellectual and cultural understanding of the late Enlightenment? How do the intensely self-conscious developments of literary theory -New Historicism, Cultural Materialism, Deconstruction, Psycho analytic critique - relate to the feminist agenda of rediscovery? To meditate on these issues may well mean, as Anne K. Mellor affirms, that cherished 'hegemonic' notions concerning the pub lic and private spheres allocated to men and women, on which so much discussion of gender and writing has been founded, have to be questioned. It was to ask, and to begin to answer, such questions that we organized an international conference, 'Rethinking Women's Poetry, 1730-1930', held at Birkbeck College, University of Lon don, in the summer of 1995. We assumed that an interrogation of the ways we read women's poetry, and the assumptions we make while reading it, would be concurrent with, and indeed indivisible from, our rediscovery of it. That was why we decided to use the word 'rethinking' rather than 'rereading'. As Curran remarks, the question '"Is it any good?" - the question I have vii viii Preface been asked over and over about the literature by women that I study, read, and teach' is an ideological rather than an aesthetic question, an attempt to prevent gender from disrupting tradi tional structures of value. Accordingly, the five groups of essays in this book ask rather different questions. The first group con siders how women's poetry reconfigures a customary epistemo logical binary, mind and body, revising eighteenth-century philosophical assumptions about mind and body, and probing the implications for a new understanding of social organization which follow from the questioning of this antithesis. A second group explores the feminist political project of the Enlightenment, arguing for a 'strong', ideologically radical reading of feminist politics, in terms both of gender politics and revolutionary politics. The woman poet's powerful intervention into the 'public' sphere is the theme of all three essays. A section on the politics of the patronage of working-class poets follows: despite the often coer cive expectations of the patron, working-class women poets could discover forms of protest, but it is necessary to consider how their texts were nevertheless often shaped by the ideology of the patron. The fourth section is concerned with the ways women poets created and mediated feminine subjectivities through remaking traditional genres and poetic language. Lastly, the gender politics and concepts of history bound up in the making of anthologies, both eighteenth-century and contemporary, and the cultural implications of the 'canon' constructed through collec tions and selections, is the topic of the final section. It is appropriate to begin where we end, with our section en titled 'Finale: A Female Canon?', and remark on Elizabeth Eger's salutary essay on 'Fashioning a Female Canon: Eighteenth-Century Women Poets and the Politics of the Anthology', because it is in many ways both admonitory preface as well as conclusion to this collection. She traces how the anthology was a major culprit in the cultural forgetting of women poets, most notably through the omission of politically radical poets of the 1790s from nine teenth-century anthologies. If they were included, a limited rep resentation of women's poetic activity prevailed. But, she warns, the contemporary reinstatement of women's poetry carries its own perils. It is too easy to establish women's writing as a counter tradition, rather than investigating how it belonged to the central debates of its culture. In the first group of essays, 'The Sensuous Eighteenth Cen- Preface ix tury: Minds and Bodies', Margaret Anne Doody takes up the chal lenge of cultural centrality. Women poets were as preoccupied as male poets with the perception and rendering of sense data, and were aware of the philosophical debates around sensation, she argues, in her 'Sensuousness in the Poetry of Eighteenth Century Women Poets'. But they did not assent to the hierarchi cal taxonomy of sensation implied by Locke, deliberately disrupting such organization for democratic purposes. Drawing on the poetry of Ann Yearsley, Mary Leapor, Mary Robinson, Anna Seward and Anna Laetitia Barbauld, she shows that women poets not only expressed a sensuous empathy with animals (like themselves, thought to be incapable of rationality), but insistently undermined, through what she terms 'the Pythagorean theme', or the trans migration of souls into the bodies of animals, the whole body/ mind antithesis on which the hierarchy of rational 'man' and animals was based. Women's preoccupation with fairies and the supernatural is related to this revolutionary Pythagoreanism, because fairies are outside the cultural classifications which en able social and gender relations to be enforced, and suggest new understandings of commonality. In his "'All Passion Entinguish'd": The Case of Mary Chandler, 1687-1745', David Shuttleton charts Mary Chandler's struggle with anorexia and deformity, and her attempts to find a discourse of Mind, reclaiming the rationality denied to women which would challenge the derogatory con structions of her condition current in eighteenth-century medi cal accounts of the female body. Lisa A. Freeman's '"A Dialogue": Elizabeth Carter's Passion for the Female Mind' explores the ways in which the Bluestocking intellectual and satirist Elizabeth Carter reverses the common association of femininity with the body by connecting the body and the irrationality of its 'lower parts' with a male speaker in her satirical poem. This lampoon radically changes social and legal codes and 'the economics of matrimo nial exchange' because 'Mind' is no longer the superior Platonic provenance of masculinity. In Part II, 'The Feminist Political Project', sexual politics and radical politics are intertwined, and both are problematized, even though all three writers here ultimately claim a 'strong' radical reading of their poets. Isobel Grundy considers the pseudony mous 'Mary Seymour Montague's' An Original Essay on Woman (1771) and its challenge to Pope's Essay on Man. One of the prob lems to be teased out is the status of anonymity, its function as