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.

Many of the earliest books, particularly those dating back to the 1900s and before, are now extremely scarce and increasingly expensive. We are republishing these classic works in affordable, high quality, modern editions, using the original text and artwork.

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in their formal poetic practice but also in diverse prose works such as prefaces, literary and devotional essays, and unpublished letters and diaries.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.

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.

Beginning with Anna Laetitia Barbauld's petition to William Wilberforce and ending with the myth-making Irish writers of the Celtic revival, this major new anthology brings to light diverse female traditions that have, for years, remained in obscurity. While the editors showcase a host of female writers well-known in their day--Felicia Hemans, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and Christina Rossetti--they widen the focus to less familiar works by working-class, colonial, and political writers. The anthology's chronological progression highlights the development of women's verse from the late Romantic period through the Victorian fin-de-siècle. The editors examine the political formations and cultural groupings to which the women belonged, along with the structures which made the development of their work possible: in particular, the numerous minority journals which allowed them a coherent voice. They consider common preoccupations with marriage, slavery, military conflict, national identity, and religious and sexual discourses, and reveal how styles and genres changed across the century. The anthology draws on first editions for texts wherever possible, retaining the spelling and punctuation of the originals for a faithful representation.

The Romance of the Lyric in Nineteenth-Century Women’s Poetry: Experiments in Form offers a new account of the nature of the lyric as nineteenth-century women poets developed the form. It offers fresh assessments of the imaginative and aesthetic complexity of women’s poetry. The monograph seeks to redefine the range and cultural significance of women’s writing using the work of poets who have not, heretofore, been part of critical accounts of nineteenth-century lyric poetry. These new voices are set beside new readings of the poetry of established figures: for example, Christina Rossetti’s Goblin Market and Augusta Webster’s “Medea in Athens” and “Circe." The monograph draws substantially on the poetry of Rosamund Marriott Watson – who was lost to literary history before the restoration of her oeuvre through the scholarly and critical work of Professor Linda K. Hughes – to make the case that once neglected and lost voices provide new ways of determining the cultural centrality of women and the poetry they produced in one of the richest periods of poetic experimentation in the Western literary tradition. This monograph contends that Watson’s poetry and prose provide new ways of analyzing the complex and frequently transgressive nature of the lyric engagement of women with folklore and myth and with the growing understanding in the nineteenth century of the fragmented, fluid self in general and of the writer in particular.

SOUND THE DEEP WATERS is a beautiful anthology of poetry and art by women from the Victorian Age. Divided into four sections: Love's Bitter Sweets, Moments of Delight, Dreams and Realities, and Last Songs, this gift-sized book contains works by poets such as Christina Rossetti, Emily Jane Bronte, and Elizabeth Barrett Browning and is illustrated with Pre-Raphaelite images. Pamela Norris has skillfully selected paintings and poems that put the reader into the heart of the Victorian world, and the result is a lovely selection that can serve as an introduction to Romantic poetry, or as a keepsake for readers who already appreciate the poetry of the era.