The Princess

Abstract

‘Upon what love is, depends what woman is, and upon what woman is, depends what the world is … There is not a greater moral necessity in England than that of a reformation in female education.’ If, as is probable, Tennyson noticed this observation on ‘The Burial of Love’ in W. J. Fox’s review of his Poems, Chiefly Lyrical, he must have responded with full approval; one of the deeper pulsations of the world to which he gave ear was the question of women’s rights in marriage and society. It needs no historical exposition to demonstrate that from Mary Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of Women (1792) to J. S. Mill’s The Subjection of Women (1869) woman was subservient to man. Almost another century was to pass before much significant change was noticeable, and the equality of men and women is still a principle recognised more in theory than in practice even at the highest levels. Education is only a means to that end, and Tennyson discussed the poem he projected on this issue with Emily Sellwood in 1839, when a college for women was ‘in the air’.