Poems

Abstract

It might seem unlikely that Anne, the youngest of the family, should prove, in her attitude to nature, the least of an innovator. But she was in reality nearer to the eighteenth century than either of her sisters, and for this reason it seems fitting to begin the study of their individual relationship to nature with her writings. This is not to say that her work was in any sense an anachronism. Like her sisters, she was of the nineteenth century, and was steeped in the poetry of Scott, Byron and Wordsworth. But her deepest affinities were with Wordsworth, not with his metaphysical ecstasies but with his use of what has been described as the “reflective imagination”.¹ Feeling and reflection were Anne’s salient qualities, and these were qualities much esteemed in the eighteenth century. But, with her, feeling was intense and, unlike sensibility, never degenerated into sentimentality, and reflection had to do not with philosophical abstractions but with personal experience. There was fire and steel in Anne, as in her sisters, but they were less evident on the surface and she strove more consciously for equilibrium. Such an attitude was not perhaps likely to produce an interpretation of nature as original as that of Charlotte or Emily.