Victorian Women's Poetry and the Near-Death Experience of a Category

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• Victorian Women’s Poetry and the Near-Death Experience of a Category
• Lee O’Brien (bio)

Whatever we plan, the future will deal with it in its own way.

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak

In her introduction to “Whither Victorian Poetry?” Linda K. Hughes formulated the purpose of the special edition as a collective endeavor to “conceive and reconfigure the field” (459). Looking at the table of contents of Victorian Poetry and the Guides to the Year’s Work since 2003, it is clear that the field was reconfigured in ways that the writers predicted but also in ways they did not foresee. My vision that a vast cohort of forgotten women poets would be unearthed through archival research and studied and taught, bringing entirely new insights into what the lyric meant in the Victorian period, especially outside professional literary circles, did not eventuate to the extent I’d hoped. James Najarian’s observation that scholars were “not necessarily writing about newly rediscovered work as about works familiar to them” (2003, p. 570) was therefore timely as well as prescient. Completely new poets did not routinely take their place beside established names, or (preferably, as I thought then) displace them entirely.¹ Spivak’s observation about the uncertain relationship between plans and a fundamentally unknowable and rather willful future provides a provisional map of the energies shaping change: stability and the forces that disrupt it still clash in ways that provide both answers and dilemmas when it comes to the future of Victorian poetry. Hughes’s questions regarding the interplay between a “sense of fundamental change” and “the professional machinery” (p. 459) in which such change must be negotiated, are more pressing now than they were then.

Thinking about Victorian women’s poetry in 2023 raises old questions—the canon (redux)—and a host of new anxieties. How is difference to [End Page 455] be acknowledged, not as a reflection of scholarly and institutional fashion, but as a perpetual and welcome reality? In 2023 many journal articles and monographs still concentrate on poets who were already receiving attention in 2003 and before. The Victorian Poetry Guides to the Year’s Work (2003–2021) reflect a scholarly focus on well known poets that remains remarkably stable. There are separate sections for Matthew Arnold, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Robert Browning, Thomas Hardy, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Swinburne, and Tennyson. Subject categories—Poets of the Nineties, the Pre-Raphaelites (occasionally Pre-Raphaelitism), Women Poets (beginning in 2010)—provide variations from the revised canon that are reflected in work of the type where reassessment is announced in the tile. Patricia Murphy’s well-received Reconceiving Nature (2019), for example, pays “determined and meticulous attention” to Augusta Webster, Mathilde Blind, Michael Field, Alice Meynell, Constance Naden, and Louisa Sarah Bevington.² The category “Victorian Women Poets” in itself reflects a continuing, perhaps ineradicable, gender hierarchy in that a separate “Victorian Men Poets” category has never existed, and maintains its status as an often unacknowledged default position. Given the continuing debate about gender, the newly contentious nature of the sex/gender distinction, and the waning cultural power of feminism, it remains to be seen, post-2023, whether “women poets” retain its currency as terminology and ideology or its capacity to draw students.

The degree to which Victorian poetry can permanently escape a male-dominated, middle-class canon beyond 2023, particularly in terms of what is taught at the undergraduate level, where future teachers and scholars begin their academic life, is still to be determined. A realist would say that the prognosis is not good. Neglected women poets can receive years of critical and scholarly attention and then recede once more into obscurity. Few women poets gain the enduring presence of Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Christina Rossetti; the critical longevity of Robert Browning, Arnold, Swinburne, and Tennyson overmatches that of most women poets. The reasons for this phenomenon go beyond questions of literary history to fundamental issues regarding the precarious nature of the rights that Victorian women fought so hard for. In a 2023 call for contributions to a special issue of Literature, spurred by the extent to which in the twenty-first century “women’s rights are under threat...