Although overshadowed by their male contemporaries, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Keats, Shelley and Byron, the women Romantic poets of the late 18th and early 19th centuries made a significant contribution to Romanticism. Nearly 40 poets are represented in this collection, including Elizabeth Barrett and Anna Seward, providing a comprehensive picture of female poetic activity from the earliest development of Romanticism to the advent of the Victorian era. The volume includes textual and thematic notes.

In this new volume, Andrew Ashfield illustrates how women extended the horizons of Romanticism by their insistent engagement with social issues such as slavery, child labor and women workers. His previous volume, "Romantic Women Poets 1770-1838," explored how women poets made important contributions to major areas of Romanticism such as landscape and seascape. Together these two volumes add new dimensions to the study of Romanticism by showing how the solitary meditation by the sea developed concurrently with major social concerns. Ashfield exposes a much more complicated relationship between the self and society than has previously prevailed in our assessments of Romanticism.