Women Romance Writers: Mary Tighe and Mary Hays

Romantic Women Poets. Genre and Gender focuses on the part played by women in the creation of the literary canon in the Romantic period in Britain. Its thirteen essays enrich our panoramic view of an age that is traditionally dominated by male authors such as Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley, Keats and Scott. Instead this volume concentrates on the poetical theory and practice of such extraordinary and fascinating women as Joanna Baillie, Charlotte Smith, Anna Laetitia Barbauld, Dorothy Wordsworth, Helen Maria Williams, Lady Morgan, Ann Radcliffe, Mary Shelley, Letitia Elizabeth Landon, Anna Seward, and Lady Caroline Lamb. Female and male poetics, gender and genres, literary forms and poetic modes are extensively discussed together with the diversity of behaviour and personal responses that the individual women poets offered to their age and provoked in their readers.