National Internationalism: Women’s Writing and European Literature, 1800–30

Abstract

Woman and the nation constitute a powerful ideological binary in the Romantic period, when women writers are active contributors of domestic, local, and regional kinds of literature that ultimately feed into, expand, and enhance the store of national culture. Thus Mary Robinson is hailed as the ‘English Sappho’, Anna Laetitia Barbauld repeatedly takes on the controversial role of educator and ‘mother’ of the nation, while in 1819 Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine triumphantly announces that ‘Scotland has her Baillie — Ireland her Tighe — England her Hemans’.¹ Simultaneously, however, women writers transgress the boundaries of a national culture that is anything but cohesive in order to explore foreign traditions, past and present, and enmesh their own production, and British literature at large, in an increasingly complex web of intercultural exchanges.² And a clear testimony of this vocation appears in Letitia Elizabeth Landon’s remark on the cosmopolitanism of Felicia Hemans’s poetic inspiration — ‘Mistress both of German and Spanish, the latter country appears to have peculiarly captivated her imagination’ — as well as her practice, since her verse is comparable to ‘the finest order of Italian singing — pure, high, and scientific’.³