Not so very long ago, anyone who was researching on pre-twentieth-century women poets was accustomed to being asked, ''Were there any?'' We have come on fast in the last couple of decades. It is almost 20 years since I attended a lecture series given by Roger Lonsdale in which he described the groundbreaking work he had been doing on the eighteenth-century women poets who he planned to include in his forthcoming Oxford anthology. For once, the term groundbreaking is hardly metaphorical. He had been rooting around in the depths of the Bodleian Library, uncovering collections that had never been catalogued: he would emerge at the end of each day literally covered in two centuries worth of dust. The lectures were enthralling, and the book that resulted, which appeared in 1989 [1], was not only a model of scholarship and a gift to those of us engaged in the practice of feminist literary history, but also an enormous pleasure simply to read. My own review of it appeared under the title ''101 Grandmothers'', an allusion to what has since become (as Margaret Forsyth points out in her article) ''almost a [literary] clich'', Elizabeth Barrett Browning''s lament: ''I look everywhere for Grandmothers and see none''.[2] Since then, of course, the work of uncovering women''s poetry from all eras has continued and many admirable anthologies have appeared [3], providing a foundation for the impressive body of scholarship that has recently been devoted to this new canon of texts.The collection of articles in this issue of Women''s Writing demonstrates the range and diversity of the critical work on nineteenth-century women poets that is going on today. The articles range from single-authored studies of writers who can be described as more or less mainstream (Barbauld, Barrett Browning) or who are gradually gaining recognition (Blessington, Jewsbury), through comparative assessments (Roberts and Landon, Rossetti and Hopkins, Procter and Keats), to broad-based surveys of the works of a number of poets whose work is still relatively unfamiliar (Irish women Romantic poets, Victorian working-class women poets).The articles have been arranged in more or less chronological order according to the dates of publication of the works that are discussed in them. The first article, however, covers a relatively long time period, beginning in the early 1800s and continuing to the 1830s: the Romantic period, in fact. Stephen Behrendt surveys a group of Irish writers who appear to be doubly disadvantaged, both by their gender and their nationality, and about whose work up to now there has been very little known. He discusses the preoccupations of their poetry, and demonstrates a clear thematic evolution from the nationalistic and partisan writing of the early years of the century to the more domestic, Christian, and moralistic work that was characteristic of the start of the Victorian era. In addition, he shows that as the century progressed, the ''Irishness'' of the poetry became less evident, and argues that this work was offering an alternative, feminine paradigm to the hostile masculinist behaviour traditionally associated with the relations between Ireland and England.In his interesting analysis of Anna Barbauld''s long political poem ''Eighteen Hundred and Eleven'', William Levine not only places the work firmly in its historical context, but also shows the crucial connection between its form and its message. Written during the anti-Napoleonic Peninsular campaign, at a period when England seemed to be heading for defeat, the poem warned that militarism and commercialism had brought the country to the brink of irreversible ruin. It is Barbauld''s choice of genre for the piece, Levine argues, which is of special interest here: the ''Johnsonian, neo-Juvenalian'' progress-poem form was, he suggests, deliberately anachronistic, carrying an embedded message of resistance to the fashionable first-generation Romantic trend towards a reflective separation from public political involvement. By returning the genre to its roots in eighteenth-century Augustan civic humanism, Barbauld relocates her poem in the centre of public culture, and offers a prophetic comment on the corruption of the political sphere.Mire n Fhlathin''s article on the poems on colonial India of Emma Roberts and Letitia Landon makes use of recent theoretical work on representations of India and on the picturesque in travel writing to offer a sophisticated analysis of the writers'' representations of difference and otherness. Roberts is shown to mask India''s less palatable aspects and to employ a familiar strategy of feminizing a colonized land. Similar tendencies are found in the work of Landon, although her poetry is said to be more stylized, no doubt partly because, unlike Roberts, she was not viewing the country at first hand. Both poets supplement their verses with notes which often seem to function as incongruous commentary, dismantling the aesthetic screen erected by the poetry.Interestingly, the poet discussed in Diego Saglia''s article, Maria Jane Jewsbury, was a member of the same literary circle as Roberts and Landon. The similarities do not end there: all three women travelled to exotic destinations. Roberts went to work in India, while Landon and Jewsbury travelled to Africa and India respectively, accompanying their new husbands. Moreover, all three were to die in their adopted countries. The sequence of Jewsbury''s poems discussed here, which appeared in the Athenaeum under the umbrella title Oceanides, was written on the long sea voyage. Thus, the poems chart the transition from the familiar to the exotic and interrogate issues of identity and domesticity as well as of nation and empire. By the end of the sequence, the concept of home has become displaced through its exposure to changing conditions and differing environments.Like Diego Saglia, Ann Hawkins also focuses on a poetic sequence, in this instance the lavishly produced volumes that appeared under the title Gems of Beauty between 1836 and 1840, written by Marguerite Gardiner, Countess of Blessington. Like the literary annuals that Blessington edited, these volumes were marketed as much for their attractive illustrations as for the poems that accompanied them. Hawkins points out, however, that the 1840 volume lacked the coherence of the three previous volumes in the series, all of which interrogated a specific topic from a variety of different viewpoints. This inconsistency may, she believes, have resulted from Blessington having to accept ready-made illustrations rather than keeping full control of the artwork supplied. In the analysis that follows, the article not only examines the poems and their accompanying plates, but also brings in a specific cultural context in its examination of the version of the 1836 volume of Gems that was produced for the French market. The concluding discussion of Blessington''s marketing strategy argues that her concern was with producing poetry that would be materially as well as artistically successful.Leslee Thorne-Murphy''s subject is Elizabeth Barrett Browning''s long verse novel Aurora Leigh. The text, she argues, is permeated by the concept that the woman poet has a radical social mission to reform society simply by inspiring her readers. In general, Barrett Browning refuses to define the Utopia that would emerge from such a social reorganization. She makes an exception, however, in one area of concern, that of sexual violence. Earlier commentators have noticed the foregrounding of issues surrounding rape and prostitution in the poem, but Murray''s discussion goes further, exploring Aurora''s use of Greek myths of rape as metaphors for her own poetic inspiration. The troubling role played by these myths, and Aurora''s eventual revision of them, is, Thorne-Murphy believes, fundamental to the poem''s quest both for social reform and for a confrontation of the divine truth the poet believes to be at the basis of all true poetic inspiration.Margaret Forsyth draws attention to a selection of poetry by working-class women poets, a group of writers who have, as she points out, been almost totally ignored until very recently. Her article argues that their double marginalization, both by gender and by social class, has meant that a valuable area of writing has not received the attention it deserves. Building on the idea of a search for grandmothers, Forsyth shows these poets turning to their own cultural backgrounds and constructing a version of ''herstory'' from the tales and stories transmitted to them orally by their mothers and grandmothers, finding there the positive role models that their exclusion from the dominant culture has denied them. She also points out another, related, tendency, that of re-examining the lives of famous women who have been victimized or martyred throughout history. Through their re-evaluation of the past, these poets are able to find voices that enable them to refigure their own roles in the present.The last two articles in this issue re-examine their female subjects in relation to their male predecessors or contemporaries. Christine Colon discusses Adelaide Procter''s ''A Legend of Provence'' in the context of Keats''s ''The Eve of St Agnes''. Both poets, Colon argues, are drawn to an examination of the possibilities offered by the imagination, but Procter, who was deeply committed to the ''Woman Question'', shifts the focus, building on Keats''s ideas to offer a compelling picture of the dangers of romantic dreams and a sympathetic reassessment of the problem of the ''fallen woman''. As a convert to Catholicism, Procter marries her religious ideals to her desire for social reform, offering religion as a positive force that can transform both the individual and society. In doing so she produces a poem that, although it may have taken ''The Eve of St Agnes'' as its starting point, has become a very different kind of work from Keats''s poem. Often viewed rather simplistically as a sentimental poet, Procter here appears as an active and political social reformer with a genuine programme for change and transformation.Christianity appears again in Sarah Winters'' article on Christina Rossetti. Here, the male poet to whom she is compared is her near-contemporary Gerard Manley Hopkins. In a fascinating and convincing argument, Winters shows that in the works and beliefs of these two important Christian poets, expected gender roles are overturned. Hopkins, she demonstrates, came to feel that his faith demanded that he abandon the supposedly masculine virtues of pride and self-assertion, and assume the traditionally feminine ones of modesty and resignation, which led to an unwillingness to allow his work to be published. Rossetti, on the other hand, found her religion to be an empowering force, which enabled her to model herself on the masculine role of a Christian preacher. Believing that her poetry might bring about a religious conversion in her readers, she boldly sought a readership in the literary marketplace. Thus, as Winters puts it, she was able ''to counter the constraints of her gender with the imperatives of her religion''.What is perhaps most encouraging about the articles in this collection is that they demonstrate the valuable work of recovery and reassessment that still continues in this field. Forgotten poetic voices are still being rediscovered, and new methodologies are being applied to those we already know. It is pleasing, too, to find scholars venturing into areas that have proved unpopular in the past: the historical poem and Christian poetry.CorrespondenceHarriet Devine Jump, Edge Hill College of Higher Education, St Helens Road, Ormskirk L39 4QP, United Kingdom (jumph@edgehill.ac.uk).Notes[1] Roger Lonsdale (Ed.) Eighteenth-century Women Poets: An Oxford Anthology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989).[2] Philip Kelley & Lewis Scott (Eds) The Browning''s Correspondence, vol. 10 (Winfield: Wedgestone Press, 1992), p. 3.[3] Among the most significant have been Angela Leighton, Victorian Women Poets: Writing against the Heart (London: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1992); Angela Leighton & Margaret Reynolds (Eds), Victorian Women Poets: An Anthology (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995); Isobel Armstrong & Joseph Bristow, with Cath Sharrock (Eds) Nineteenth-century Women Poets: An Oxford Anthology (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996); and Duncan Wu (Ed.) Romantic Women Poets: An Anthology (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]
