Influence, Anxiety, and Erasure in Women’s Writing: Romantic becomes Victorian

Abstract

When in 1828 Felicia Hemans published Records of Woman, with Other Poems, she concluded the first section, the ‘Records’, with the only poem in that section that documents the life (and death) of a contemporary woman. Significantly, that contemporary woman is the Irish poet Mary Tighe, whose grave Hemans describes, even though she had not yet, in fact, seen the spot personally and would not visit it until 1831. ‘The Grave of a Poetess’ is delicately positioned between two worlds, two cultural moments. It is at once an elegy on the premature death from consumption in 1810 of the beautiful virtuoso author of Psyche; or, the Legend of Love (composed 1801–02, published privately 1805 and republished 1811) and a meditation upon the fate of the woman poet in the emerging Victorian bourgeois world. Writing to John Lodge in 1831 after finally visiting Tighe’s grave at Woodstock, Hemans admitted that she ‘could not but reflect on the many changes which had brought me to the spot I had commemorated three years since, without the slightest idea of ever visiting it; and though [I was] surrounded by attention and the appearance of interest [in me], my heart was envying the repose of her who slept there’.¹ Hemans was by 1828 a celebrated poet and the object of much public notice throughout the tour during which she visited Tighe’s grave, but her comment to Lodge speaks to a perennial private concern among British women poets of the entire Romantic and post-Romantic era: the extent to which a publishing woman poet’s life and circumstances belong both to her as a private individual and to her readers as an author – indeed as a very public ‘poetess’. The point is as valid for poets from the early part of the period, such as Charlotte Smith, Anna Seward, Mary Robinson, and the then-popular Lady Manners (the former Catherine Rebecca Gray), as it is for later ones such as Hemans, Letitia Landon, Mary Ann Browne, and the Irish poet and travel writer Louisa Stuart Costello.