The first collection to make a comprehensive study of nineteenth-century women's poetry from late Romantic to late Victorian 'new woman' writers. Eighteen essays consider the gendered codes and genres developed by sophisticated poets. The feminine subject and marketing, a woman's tradition, lesbian desire, war, race, colonial experience, religion and science are themes of the collection, featuring, as well as the familiar Christina Rossetti and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, other poets such as 'L.E.L.', Felicia Hemans, Amy Levy and Augusta Webster.

This reader contains sixteen new and recent essays addressing work by, and issues raised concerning, Victorian women poets. Among those discussed directly are: Elizabeth Barrett Browing, Emily Bronte, George Eliot, Michael Field, Felicia Hemans, Adelaide Proctor, Christina Rossetti, and Rosamund Marriott Watson. Key topics dealt with include the nature of home,the market, the fallen woman and the moral law, the mother, and the muse. Critics represented are: Isobel Armstrong, Kathleen Blake, Susan Conley, Stevie Davies, Sandra M. Gilbert, Gill Gregory, Terrence Holt, Linda K. Hughes, Angela Leighton, Tricia Lootens, Jerome J. McGann, Dorothy Mermin, Margaret Reynolds, Dolores Rosenblum, Chris White, and Joyce Zonana.

One of the triumphs of feminist criticism has been to rescue major poets such as Emily Bronte, Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Christina Rossetti from neglect. While the essays chosen for this volume focus on these three major figures, work is also included on less well-known poets who have only recently been brought into critical prominence. The introduction clarifies for the reader the themes, problems and preoccupations that inform the criticism and provides a useful guide to the debates surrounding poetry and feminism. The advantages and disadvantages of applying different critical approaches, such as psychoanalytic and historicist, to the understanding of this period and genre are also fully explored. The substantial introduction, headnotes, detailed bibliography and suggestions for further reading will make this book essential reading for students of English, Victorian and Women's Literature, and Feminist Critical Theory.

Examining the appropriation of transgressive, violent female figures from ancient Greek literature and myth by late Victorian writers, Olverson reveals the extent to which ancient antagonists like the murderous Medea and the sinister Circe were employed as a means to protest against and comment upon contemporary social and political institutions.

In this study, Gray examines the broadly neglected body of Victorian women's religious verse, showing how women of the period used an array of inventive literary strategies to construct and wield provocative forms of authority. Their deployment of biblical source, trope and genre transfigured Christian and lyric traditions.

Emily Harrington offers a new history of women’s poetry at the turn of the century that breaks from conventional ideas of nineteenth-century lyric, which focus on individual subjectivity. She argues that women poets conceived of lyric as an intersubjective genre, one that seeks to establish relations between subjects rather than to constitute a subject in isolation. Moving away from canonical texts that contribute to the commonly held notion that lyric poetry is an utterance made in solitude, Harrington explores the work of Christina Rossetti, Augusta Webster, A. Mary F. Robinson, Alice Meynell, and Dollie Radford to show how nineteenth-century poetic conventions shaped and were shaped by concepts of intimacy. Writing about relationships that are familial, divine, sexual, literary, and musical, these poets reconsidered the dynamics of absence and presence, and subject and object, that are at the heart of the lyric enterprise. Harrington locates these poets' theories of intimacy not only in their formal poetic practice but also in diverse prose works such as prefaces, literary and devotional essays, and unpublished letters and diaries. By analyzing various patterns of versification and modes of address, she articulates new ways of thinking about the bonds of verse and enlarges our understanding of verse culture in the late nineteenth century.

This comprehensive introductory anthology of poems by forty women writers from Elizabethan to Victorian times includes work by aristocrats and frame-workers, by celebrated figures such as Aphra Behn, the Brontës, Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Christina Rossetti, and by fascinating but hitherto inaccessible poets such as the unaccountably neglected Margaret Cavendish and Mary Leapor. Love songs, feminist polemic, witty satire and religious rhapsody, bawdy fun and grave meditation abound. Dr R.E. Pritchard in a brief introduction considers the social and publishing difficulties encountered by writing women. The texts are tactfully modernized and annotated. Each poet is introduced with a biographical sketch, followed by suggestions for further reading. Compact yet varied and far-ranging, this anthology will provide enjoyment for any poetry reader and the introduction raises the issues crucial to those interested in the hidden traditions of women's poetry.