Definition
Combining her interest in feminism with her commitment to Catholicism, Adelaide Procter (1825–1864) wrote poetry designed not only to engage a wide audience of readers but also to increase her readers’ spiritual devotion and social action as she encouraged them to pay closer attention to the inequities in their society and work to address them.
Introduction
Adelaide Anne Procter was born in London on October 30, 1825. Her father, Bryan Waller Procter, trained and worked as a solicitor but was also a well-known author, publishing poems and essays under the pseudonym of Barry Cornwall. Her mother, Anne Skepper Procter, was an engaging hostess who became known for her literary salons frequented by authors and artists such as Thomas Carlyle, Charles Dickens, William Makepeace Thackeray, Anna Murphy Jameson, Fanny Kemble, the Rossettis, and Robert Browning (Gregory 1998). Adelaide Procter, then, was raised in a home that was permeated by literature and the arts. Dickens, in...
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References
Boucherette, J. 1864. Adelaide Anne Procter. The English Woman’s Journal 13: 17–21.
Colón, C.A. 2005. Lessons from the medieval convent: Adelaide Procter’s “A legend of provence”. In Beyond Arthurian romances and gothic thriller: The reach of Victorian medievalism, ed. L.M. Holloway and J.A. Palmgren, 95–115. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Dickens, C. 1859. The haunted house. All the year round, 2, 1–48.
———. 1902. Introduction. In The complete poetical works of Adelaide Anne Procter, xiii–xx. New York: Houghton Mifflin.
Dieleman, K. 2012. Religious imaginaries: The liturgical and poetic practices of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Christian Rossetti, and Adelaide Procter. Athens: Ohio University Press.
Gregory, G. 1998. The life and work of Adelaide Procter: Poetry, feminism and fathers. Brookfield: Ashgate.
Herstein, S. 1985. A mid-Victorian feminist, Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon. New York: Yale University Press.
Hoeckley, C.L. 2007. “Must her own words do all?”: Domesticity, catholicism and activism in Adelaide Anne Procter’s poems. In The Catholic church and unruly women writers, ed. J. DelRosso, L. Eicke, and A. Kothe, 123–138. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Maison, M. 1965. Queen Victoria’s favourite poet. The Listener and BBC Television Review 73 (1883): 636–637.
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Colón, C.A. (2019). Procter, Adelaide. In: The Palgrave Encyclopedia of Victorian Women's Writing. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-02721-6_68-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-02721-6_68-1
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