Romantic Women Poets: Genre and Gender

The essays included in this book are in line with the re-evaluation of Romantic women’s writing begun in the 1980s in Britain and in the United States, an ongoing process of critical reassessment which, without overlooking the important relationship that women poets established with the “canonical” Romantic male poets, intends to recognise the crucial role that women themselves played within the Georgian context, enriching it with cultural diversity and informing it with new vitality. The age of revolutions cannot be understood without their contribution to the development of the literary market as well as to the progress of society as a whole. In order to draw an overall picture of the Romantic age it is therefore essential to investigate their poetic modes, their strategies in engaging with the public sphere, their taste for generic experimentation and literary hybridism, and their constant dialogic relationship with contemporary and antecedent male authors. The women writers discussed in this volume - Joanna Baillie, Charlotte Smith, Anna Laetitia Barbauld, Dorothy Wordsworth, Helen Maria Williams, Lady Morgan, Mary Robinson, Ann Radcliffe, Letitia Elizabeth Landon, Anna Seward, Felicia Hemans, Lady Caroline Lamb, Mary Tighe and Mary Hays – are now legitimately included in every academic syllabus and in any editorial or critical project on Romanticism.