Reprint of the original, first published in 1876.

If we could ask a Romantic reader of new poetry in 1820 to identify the most celebrated poet of the day after Byron, the chances are that he or she would reply with the name of Barry Cornwall'. Solicitor, dandy and pugilist, Cornwall -- pseudonym of Bryan Waller Procter (1787-1874) -- published his first poems in the Literary Gazette in late 1817. By February 1820, under the tutelage of Keats's mentor, Leigh Hunt, Cornwall had produced three volumes of verse. Marcian Colonna sold 700 copies in a single morning, a figure exceeding Keats's lifetime sales. Hazlitt's suppressed anthology, Select British Poets (1824), allocated Cornwall nine pages -- the same number as Keats, and more than Southey, Lamb or Shelley; Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine pronounced Cornwall a poet of 'originality and genius'; and in 1821, Gold's London Magazine announced that in terms of 'tenderness and delicacy' even Percy Shelley was 'surpassed very far indeed by Barry Cornwall'. It is difficult to square Cornwall's early nineteenth-century popularity with his subsequent neglect. In Bright Stars Richard Marggraf Turley concentrates on Cornwall's phenomenonal success between 1817 and 1823, emphatically returning an important and unjustly neglected Romantic author to critical focus. Marggraf Turley explores Cornwall's rivalry -- and at various junctures, political camaraderie -- with fellow Hunt protégé Keats, whose career exists in a fascinatingly mirrored relationship with his own trajectory into celebrity. The book argues that Cornwall helped to structure Keats's experience as a poet but also explores the central question of how Cornwall's racy and politically subversive poetry managed to establish a broad readership where Keatss similarly indecorous publications met with review hostility and readerly indifference.

First published in 1998, this volume follows the life and work of Adelaide Procter (1825-1864), one of the most important 19th-century women poets to be reassessed by literary critics in recent years. She was a significant figure in the Victorian literary landscape. A poet (who outsold most writers bar Tennyson), a philanthropist and Roman Catholic convert, Procter committed herself to the cause of single, fallen and homeless women. She was a key member of the Langham Place Circle of campaigning women and worked tirelessly for the society for Promoting the Employment of Women. Many of her poems are concerned with anonymous and displaced women who struggle to secure an identity and place in the world. She also writes boldly and unconventionally of women’s sexual desires. Loved and admired by her father the poet Bryan Procter, her editor Charles Dickens and her friend W.M. Thackeray, Procter wrote from the heart of London literary circles. From this position she mounted a subtle and creative critique of the ideas and often gendered positions adopted by male predecessors and contemporaries such as John Keble, Robert Browning and Dickens himself. Gill Gregory’s The Life and Work of Adelaide Procter: Poetry, Feminism and Fathers considers the career of this compelling and remarkable woman and discusses the extent to which she struggled to find her own voice in response to the works of some seminal literary ‘fathers’.