A Book of Women’s Verse
Oxford University Press
_London_ _Edinburgh_ _Glasgow_ _Copenhagen_
_New York_ _Toronto_ _Melbourne_ _Cape Town_
_Bombay_ _Calcutta_ _Madras_ _Shanghai_
Humphrey Milford Publisher to the UNIVERSITY
A Book
of
Women’s Verse
Edited
with a Prefatory Essay
by
J. C. Squire
Oxford
At the Clarendon Press
1921
TO ALICE MEYNELL
PREFACE
I am not prepared with any philosophic justification for the compilation
of this book. Poetry is poetry, whoever writes it. But it is a fact, at
least so far as my observation goes, that people do feel curiosity about
women’s contributions to the arts, and that this curiosity is common to
all kinds of persons, from those who exaggerate the differences between
the sexes, to those who seem to think that they can eradicate them. I
myself felt this curiosity when I conceived this anthology: and it would
be stupid not to admit it.
It is not the first collection of the sort that has been made, but so far
as I am aware it has only one predecessor which can be taken seriously
and that is over a hundred years old. The principal collections which
have come to my notice may be briefly recorded in chronological order.
(1) _Poems by Eminent Ladies_, published in two volumes in 1755 and said
to have been edited by Colman and Bonnel Thornton. The preface opens
‘These volumes are perhaps the most solid compliment that can possibly
be paid the Fair Sex. They are a standing proof that great abilities are
not confined to the men, and that genius often glows with equal warmth,
and perhaps with more delicacy, in the breast of a female’. The intention
was generous, but the ‘standing proof’ does not stand on these volumes.
No research had been done for them, and the eighteen ladies represented
in them were mainly bad poetastresses of the time. A reprint, with
additions, appeared in 1780.
(2) _Specimens of British Poetesses, Selected and Chronologically
Arranged_ by the Rev. Alexander Dyce (1827), was the earliest product
of the right happy and copious industry of that learned man. It is the
only book in the list with any pretensions to scholarship, and any man
who follows in Dyce’s footsteps must be struck both by the range of
his research and the judicious manner in which he chose his extracts
from the books he found. His work is not beyond criticism. There were
poetesses, earlier than himself, whom he missed, of whom Lady Nairne is
an outstanding example. He was rather too eager to get in something by
any Female versifier whom he discovered, and distinctly over-generous
to his own contemporaries. Moreover he gave feminine authorship the
benefit of the doubt when the doubt in its favour was very slender. His
evidence for the attribution of ‘Defiled is my namefull sore’ to Anne
Boleyn was remarkably slight. There is not much more for the ascription
of the celebrated sporting treatises to Juliana Berners. Neither of these
reputed poetesses appears in the present volume, for the simple reason
that I do not believe in them. Even on his own ground Dyce might have
been surpassed by somebody standing on Dyce’s shoulders. But had his work
been perfect, a hundred years, which have seen the prime of the three
greatest of English poetesses, have passed since he published it. I may
at this point acknowledge my debt to him, although the poems I have taken
from him are very few.
(3) _The Female Poets of Great Britain, chronologically arranged with
copious selections and critical remarks_ by Frederic Rowton, 1848. To
this volume, large as it is, no such debt will be acknowledged. Mr.
Rowton, on his title page, claims the authorship of other works entitled
_The Debater_ and _Capital Punishment Reviewed_; if literary piracy were
treated as maritime piracy is, one could understand his interest in
the death penalty. He was a thief, a hypocrite, a most oily and prolix
driveller: a bad specimen of what a modern polemist has called ‘the
louse on the locks of literature’. This heat against a man long dead
may seem excessive; but after all one could not say so much if he were
still alive, and his brazenness has probably never been noticed before.
Listen to his Preface. ‘Of our _male_ Poets there are (to say the least
of it) histories enough. Johnson, Campbell, Aikin, Anderson, Southey,
and others, have done due honour to the genius of the rougher sex; and
have left us—so far as they have gone—nothing to be desired. But where
are the memorials of the Female mind?... One or two small works (among
which Mr. Dyce’s _Specimens of British Poetesses_ is the only one of
merit and research) have been devoted to the subject, it is true; but
even the worthiest of these productions is at best but incomplete. It
cannot surely be pretended that this neglect of our Female Poets is
attributable to any lack of genius in the sex. In these enlightened
days it may certainly be taken for granted that women have souls ... we
should be deeply ashamed of ourselves for so long withholding from them
that prominent place in the world’s esteem which is so undoubtedly their
due.’ What a Chadband! We have here the very accents of that speech about
the beasts of the field and the human boy.—‘Are you a bird of the air?
No!’ ‘That prominent place in the world’s esteem!’ One might imagine
he was talking about some obscure and unnoticed tribe of the brute
creation: badgers perhaps, or Dartford warblers. He was for the first
time calling the attention of the human race to the existence of women,
which could only be demonstrated, apparently, by putting their works
into anthologies. But the most notable thing is that like all his kind
he was not only a humbug but a sly robber. That patronizing parenthesis
about Dyce, without a word of acknowledgment, is the one reference in
his preface to a man on whose labours he battened. Half his book—it
might be very well if he admitted it, for Dyce was competent—came bodily
out of Dyce. That was the only part of it worth printing. Dyce did all
his research for him; the rest of his huge book was filled with the
maundering prettinesses of early nineteenth-century writers. His notes on
the old poetesses are Dyce’s rewritten, often not even that; that he was
conscious of his dishonest intent is proved by the way in which here and
there, without any sensible reason, he changes with obtuse cunning the
order of the transcribed extracts. He had not even the sense to see that
at one place he copied from Dyce a highly ridiculous misprint!
If his earlier notes are certainly pilfered, his later are as certainly
his own. Pages of gush are devoted to the numerous geniuses of his
time. Of Mrs. Margaret Hodson he says that ‘Her narratives flow on as
gracefully and smoothly as Scott’s: she closely resembles that great
writer, indeed, in many respects, although as regards dramatic skill she
is certainly superior.... One cannot but feel surprised that a lady of
our peaceful age should be so thoroughly imbued with the martial spirit
of our warlike ancestors. The fact proves not merely the strength of the
human imagination, but also that the imagination is not sexual’. Of Mary
Howitt he says that ‘As a versifier, as a moralist, and as a philosopher,
she may safely challenge comparison with any writer of her own sex and
with most of the writers of the other sex.... Mrs. Howitt is indeed a
writer of whom England may be, and will be, eternally proud’. ‘There is
in Miss Cook’, he says, ‘that fine eloquence which grows as it advances’.
But I may be deemed to have celebrated sufficiently the character of this
man and I come to the next.
(4) _Women’s Voices_ by Mrs. William Sharp, 1887. This is an equally
bad compilation in its way, happily a different way. Mrs. Sharp says
‘There has not, so far as I am aware, been any anthology formed with
the definite aim to represent each of our women-poets by one or more
essentially characteristic poems’. She may have been unacquainted with
Dyce: at all events she left out half his most interesting things. Her
book, terribly dedicated ‘To all Women’, looks like a feminist manifesto:
it is even more than Morton’s crowded with the ephemeral productions of
contemporaries. They were only, many of them, of the eighties; but they
have faded now.
* * * * *
Possibly there are ephemerides in this volume also. But I have done my
best to keep them out. My criteria may be briefly explained. From the
moderns I have taken only poems which appear to me meritorious; but in
the earlier portion of the work there will be found some poems put in
merely as curiosities or because they are the best representatives of
their time that can be found. I have left out a great many of Dyce’s
poetesses. I could not bring myself to print Diana Primrose, in spite
of her lovely name, or the monstrously ingenious Mary Fage, of the
seventeenth century though she was. But I may say quite frankly that if I
had come across, say, a poem of Chaucer’s day indisputably by a woman it
would have gone in even though it were the weakest doggerel. But I know
nothing as early as that. Professor Gollancz, I believe, thinks _Pearl_
was by a woman; perhaps it was, but we don’t know. I have omitted, as I
said, verse imputed to Juliana Berners and Anne Boleyn. By the same token
I have left out _Hardy-Knute_, which may or may not have been by Lady
Wardlaw. I do not think it a great loss, for it is long and does not live
up to its opening. _There’s nae luck_ would have gone in had I really
felt sure that Jean Adams was a likelier author than Mickle. I should
have been glad to have included the beautiful lines attributed to James
I’s noble and unfortunate daughter, Elizabeth of Bohemia, if I had seen
satisfactory evidence for the attribution. Mrs. Tighe’s long _Psyche_,
a poem of respectable accomplishment, I searched for quotable extracts,
finding none; her poem about a lily I rejected after hesitation. I found
myself reluctantly disinclined to include anything by Margaret Fuller or
George Eliot. Beyond these and a few moderns I do not believe that I had
much hesitation.
* * * * *
There will be found here some authors and some poems which have appeared
in no previous anthology of any kind, so far as I know; one or two
authors never known, and many who have been forgotten since Dyce dug
them up. In all but a very few instances I have procured and searched
the original volumes even where I have ultimately selected poems which
previous anthologists have chosen before me. They do not always, be it
understood, choose the worst and leave the best for other people. But
good work is not the only thing to which interest attaches, and while
looking for poetesses I have come across many odd things. I may be
permitted, while the night is yet young, so to speak, to make a few stray
remarks about some of them.
There never was a time, whatever Mr. Morton may have supposed, when the
Female Sex entirely escaped notice, or even ‘esteem’. But there was a
time when it took no active share in literature. To-day we scarcely
bother about the distinction between men and women writers. With
thousands of women writing, with women’s verses in every magazine and
women reporters in every newspaper office, when literary women congregate
in clubs, and robust women novelists haggle with editors and discuss
royalties with their male rivals, we take composition for granted as
a feminine occupation. Even though we may not expect it we should be
only mildly surprised if a female Plato or Shakespeare were to appear,
and a second of the sort would cause no surprise at all. But it has all
occurred very rapidly; it is less than a hundred years since Southey
wrote to Charlotte Brontë ‘Literature cannot be the business of a woman’s
life, and it ought not to be’. Before the days of Fanny Burney and Jane
Austen the woman writer was a lonely figure, however different may have
been the ways in which various generations regarded her. One looks back
through the centuries and sees these poetesses scattered about in ones
and twos, fine ladies, quiet countrywomen with taste and education,
blue stockings, pet prodigies brought up in literary circles, stupid
women vain of their accomplishments, timid women apologizing for their
temerity; almost all of them inevitably and pathetically self-conscious
about the opinion of the watching males around them. Nevertheless the
degree of that self-consciousness seems to have varied. There was very
little poetry—though we do not know about many beautiful anonymous
Elizabethan poems—by women in the sixteenth and early seventeenth
centuries. One of them speaks to us direct on the subject: Mary Oxlie or
Morpet, who wrote a dedicatory poem to her fellow-countryman Drummond of
Hawthornden:
Perfection in a woman’s work is rare;
From an untroubled mind should verses flow;
My discontents make mine too muddy show;
And hoarse encumbrances of household care,
Where these remain the Muses ne’er repair.
But it did not, I think, occur to many early poetesses to apologize for
writing or appeal for masculine mercy. Those who did write, of course,
were mainly aristocrats, and whatever the standards of the rest of the
population there has always been a good deal of democracy within the
aristocracy, and an element of high culture amongst aristocratic women.
Even in the eighteenth century, one of Horace Walpole’s lady friends
might not have apologized for writing verses as humbler contemporaries of
his felt impelled to do. But after the Commonwealth we do commonly find
apologies or protestations in text or preface.
The authorized folio of Katherine Philips (Orinda) is very enlightening.
I have some doubts as to the literary modesty of Orinda: one sees behind
her poems a bouncing gushing creature of the kind not usually content to
hide their lights under bushels. But she protests enough. The standard
edition was published posthumously; there had been in her lifetime a
pirated book full of errors which she vehemently repudiated:
‘The injury done me by that Publisher and Printer’, she wrote,
‘exceeds all the troubles that I remember I ever had ... it
is impossible for malice itself to have printed those Rimes
(you tell me gotten abroad so impudently) with so much abuse
to the things, as the very publication of them at all, though
they had been never so correct, had been to me.’ She was ‘that
unfortunate person that cannot so much as think in private,
that must have my imaginations rifled and exposed to play the
Mountebanks, and dance upon the Ropes to entertain all the
rabble; to undergo all the raillery of the Wits, and all the
severity of the Wise, and to be the sport of some that can,
and some that cannot read a Verse ... it hath cost me a sharp
fit of sickness since I heard it ... a thousand pounds to have
bought my permission for their being printed should not have
obtained it.’
‘Sometimes’, she says, ‘I think that employment so far above my reach
and unfit for my sex, that I am going to resolve against it for ever’,
but ‘the truth is, I have an incorrigible inclination to that folly
of riming, and, intending the effects of that humour, only for my own
amusement in my own life’. Her editor, however, was proud to publish
them: ‘Some of them would be no disgrace to the name of any Man that
amongst us is most esteemed for his excellency in this kind, and there
are none that may not pass with favour, when it is remembered that they
fell hastily from the pen but of a Woman. We might well have called her
the English Sappho.’ She would, he says, have been persuaded to publish a
correct impression of herself:
But the small Pox, that malicious disease (as knowing how
little she would have been concern’d for her handsomeness, when
at the best) was not satisfied to be as injurious a Printer
of her face, as the other had been of her poems, but treated
her with a more fatal cruelty than the Stationer had them;
for though he to her most sensible affliction surreptitiously
possessed himself of a false Copy, and sent those children
of her Fancy into the World, so martyred, that they were
more unlike themselves than she could have been made had she
escaped; that murtherous Tyrant, with greater barbarity seiz’d
unexpectedly upon her, the fine Original, and to the much
juster affliction of all the world, violently tore her out of
it, and hurried her untimely to her grave, upon the 22 of June
1664, she being then but 31 [34] years of age. But he could not
bury her in oblivion, for this monument which she erected for
herself, will for ever make her to be honoured as the honour of
her Sex, the emulation of ours, and the admiration of both.
Comment on the beauties of this last paragraph is beyond me. The
commendatory poems prefaced to Orinda’s works echo these lofty strains.
Lord Orrery wrote:
And as Our Sex resigns to Yours the due,
So all of your bright Sex must yield to You.
Lord Roscommon pictured himself surrounded by lions on some Lybian plain:
The Magick of Orinda’s name,
Not only can their fierceness tame,
But, if that mighty word I once rehearse,
They seem submissively to roar in Verse.
A pseudonymous lady, more vehement than her subject, argued that
environment (she didn’t know the word) made all the difference between
the sexes:
Trained up to Arms, we Amazons have been,
And Spartan Virgins strong as Spartan Men:
Breed Women but as Men, and they are these;
Whilst Sybarit Men are Women by their eyes....
Nature to Females freely doth impart
That, which the Males usurp, a stout, bold heart;
Thus Hunters female Beasts fear to assail
And female Hawks more mettal’d than the male.
This feminine anticipation of Mr. Kipling is followed by the assertion
that since souls were equal it was obviously not the ‘he or she’ that
wrote poetry.
It is a fine collection of tributes. A poem, with noble passages, by the
neglected Flatman comes into it, and there are two interesting Odes by
Cowley. One begins:
We allow’d you beauty, and we did submit
To all the tyrannies of it.
Ah cruel Sex! will you depose us too in Wit?
The other, full of the oddest tropes, states that:
The World did never but two Women know
Who, one by fraud, the other by wit did rise
To the two tops of Spiritual dignities;
One Female Pope of old, one Female Poet now.
The panegyric was impressive; but it was all somewhat patronizing,
addressed as though to a flying pig. There is an air of strain about
Orinda’s nearest contemporary rival. The gifted Anne Killigrew, who,
dying young, was the subject of a great ode by Dryden, had to write a
long poem protesting against the ‘saying that her verses were made by
another’:
Like Aesop’s painted jay, I seem’d to all,
Adorn’d in plumes, I not my own could call.
She produced Orinda as evidence that women could be good poets, and she
said quaintly of Alexander the Great:
Nor will it from his Conquests derogate,
A Female Pen his Acts did celebrate.
There is nothing diffident about the attitude of Aphra Behn, the tough,
audacious, fearless young widow who forced her way to dramatic success
under the Restoration, and who was the first of our professional women
writers. She has been rather unfairly treated by historians. It is true
that her plays are as gross, in subject and speech, as any of her time:
possibly her coarseness was the defect of the quality which enabled her
to fight her lone hand in the Grub Street of the day. But there is a
hearty straightforwardness about her which is lacking in some of the men
of the Restoration, she had a gift for broad, strong characterization,
she was honest, rough, kind, affectionate, not at all cynical, and she
wrote English of an Elizabethan lustiness. She did not apologize, she
counter-attacked. She was not allowed to forget her sex but she soundly
thumped those who reminded her that her plays and poems were ‘writ by
a woman’. Here is a passage from the _Epistle to the Reader_ which
introduces _The Dutch Lover_:
Indeed that day ’twas acted first, there comes me into the
Pit, a long lither, phlegmatick, white, ill-favour’d wretched
Fop, an officer in Masquerade newly transported with a Scarf
and Feather out of France, a sorry Animal that has nought else
to shield it from the uttermost contempt of all Mankind, but
that respect which we afford to Rats and Toads, which though
we do not well allow to live, yet when considered as parts of
God’s Creation, we make honourable mention of them. A thing,
Reader—but no more of such a Smelt: This thing, I tell ye,
opening that which serves it for a mouth, out issued such a
noise as this to those that sate about it, that they were to
expect a usefull Play, God damn him, for it was a woman’s....
I would not for a world be taken arguing with such a propertie
as this; but if I thought there were a man of such tolerable
parts, who could upon mature deliberation distinguish well
his right hand from his left, and justly state the difference
between the number of sixteen and two, yet had this prejudice
upon him; I would take a little pains to make him know how
much he errs. For waving the examination why women having
equal education with men, were not as capable of knowledge,
of whatsoever sort as well as they: I’ll only say as I have
to such and before, that Plays have no great room for that
which is men’s great advantage over women, that is Learning;
we all know that the immortal Shakespeare’s Plays (who was not
guilty of much more of this than often falls to women’s share)
have better pleas’d the World than Johnson’s works, though
by the way ’tis said the Benjamin was no such Rabbi neither,
for I am inform’d that his Learning was but Grammar high
(sufficient indeed to rob poor Salust of his best orations);
and it hath been observ’d that they are apt to admire him
most confoundedly, who have just such a scantling of it as he
had.... Then for their musty rules of Unity, and God knows what
besides, if they meant anything, they are enough intelligible
and as practicable by a woman.
This was in 1673. Forty years afterwards we get a side-light from the
preface to Mary Monk’s poems, written after her death by her father Lord
Molesworth. The preface takes the form of a dedication (fifty pages)
to Carolina, Princess of Wales, who is greeted with this ambiguous
salutation: ‘The true value, you have for Liberty, is so remarkable, that
one wou’d wonder where your Royal Highness (who has been bred up in a
part of Europe, but slenderly furnish’d with just notions of that great
Blessing) cou’d have acquired it’. Lord Molesworth repeats with approval
charges recently made against women—this was two hundred years ago and on
the verge of the eighteenth century!
That the Natural Sweetness and Modesty which so well became
their Sex, and so much recommended them to the Love and Esteem
of the Men is (by many) exchanged for a Careless Indecent,
Masculine Air [imitating] the Rakeish, Milder sort of Gentlemen
in the Excess in Love of Gaming, Snuff-Taking, Habit, and a
Modish Neglect of their Husbands, Children and Families.
As for his daughter’s verses, of the tone of which he is proud, he says
affectingly:
We found most of them in her Scrittore after her death, written
with her own Hand, little expecting, and as little desiring,
the Publick shou’d have any Opportunity of either Applauding or
Condemning them.
It might be possible to find some women writers of the age to whom Lord
Molesworth’s strictures might be held, in part, to apply: Mrs. Centlivre,
De la Rivière Manly, and Lady Mary Montagu. But it gives us a shock to
hear them applied to the generality of early Georgian women, and they
certainly would not apply to the poetesses (with whom we are specially
concerned) of the rest of the century. Most of them were extremely
severe and models of propriety, proud to display what learning they
really had, but studious to exhibit a decorous modesty about publication.
The first edition (1696) of the poems of Philomela (Mrs. Elizabeth Singer
Rowe) was published pseudonymously: her ‘Name had been prefixed, had not
her own Modesty absolutely forbidden it’. The preface was written (from
Harding’s Rents) by Elizabeth Johnson, who stoutly defended her sex:
We are not unwilling to allow Mankind the Brutal Advantages
of Strength, they are Superior to ours in Force, they have
Custom on their Side, and have Ruled, and are like to do so;
and may freely do it without Disturbance or Envy; at least
they should have none from us, if they could keep quiet among
themselves. But when they would Monopolize Sense too, when
neither that, nor Learning, nor so much as Wit must be allow’d
us, but all over-ruled by the Tyranny of the Prouder Sex; nay
when some of them will not let us say our Souls are our own,
but would persuade us we are no more Reasonable Creatures than
themselves, or their Fellow-Animals; we then must ask their
Pardons if we are not yet so Compleatly Passive as to bear
all without so much as a Murmur: We complain, and we think
with Reason, that our Fundamental Constitutions are Destroyed;
that here is a plain and open Design to render us mere Slaves,
perfect Turkish Wives, without Properties or Sense or Souls;
and are forced to Protest against it, and Appeal to all the
World, whether these are not notorious Violations on the
Liberties of Freeborn Englishwomen? This makes the meekest Worm
amongst us all, ready to turn again when we are thus trampled
on; But alas! What can we do to Right ourselves? Stingless
and Harmless as we are, we can only Kiss the Foot that hurts
us. However, sometimes it pleases Heaven to raise up some
Brighter Genius than ordinary to Succour a Distressed People;
an Epaminondas in Thebes; a Timoleon for Corinth; (for you
must know we read Plutarch, now he is translated) and a Nassau
for all the World: Nor is our Defenceless Sex forgotten! we
have not only Bonducas and Zenobias; but Saphos and Daciers;
Schurmans, Orindas and Behns, who have humbled the most haughty
of our Antagonists, and made them do Homage to our Wit as well
as to our Beauty.
Forty years passed before her poems were reprinted by Curll with a note
from the author desiring him ‘to own, that it’s his Partiality to my
Writings, not my Vanity, which has occasioned the Re-publishing of them’.
Curll himself wrote the preface, telling the story of Mrs. Rowe’s life
and marriage in the strain of ‘Long had this Lady been the Wish and Hope
of many desiring Swains’. He addressed himself to Pope; said that Prior
had praised Philomela; and quoted Dr. Watts as saying that ‘the Honour
of Poetry is retrieved by such Writers, from the Scandal which has been
cast upon it, by the Abuse of Verse to loose and profane Purposes’.
Philomela’s diffident reserve was the common thing. Mary Jones, one of
the best known, a friend of Dr. Johnson and author of verses respectably
polished and pointed, prefaced her fat volume with the apologetic
statement that her poems were ‘the product of pure nature only, and
most of them wrote at a very early age’. She had for long shrunk from
publication out of respect for ‘them [her friends], the world and myself’
and only resorted to it at last (under the patronage of the Dutch
Stadtholder) in order to raise money for an aged and indigent relative.
She must have raised a good deal: her subscription list (Christopher
Smart and Horace Walpole appear in it) is a huge one. Her opening lines
are unpromising:
How much of paper’s spoil’d, what floods of ink!
And yet how few, how very few can think.
But the rest of the poem (printed in this volume) is amusing and explains
her pretty well. Her reluctance to set out a dedication
With lies enough to make a lord asham’d!
was not shared by her contemporary Mary Masters, whose verses (alleged
to have been corrected by Dr. Johnson) were dedicated to the Earl of
Burlington. She prostrates herself in the most approved Grub Street mode.
He is exalted; she lowly and untuneful:
Yet when a _British Peer_ has deign’d to shed
His gen’rous favours on my worthless Head;
Silent shall I receive the welcome Boon?
Boon indeed:
He spoke; he prais’d, I hearken’d with delight
And found a strong Propensity to write.
The humility of the women authors and the implied condescension of the
men were at their acutest during the eighteenth century. Poetesses,
however, were far more numerous than before. There were (though
Scotswomen wrote some immortal songs) no very notable ones; and the
spread of authorship did not greatly affect women of the upper classes.
Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, was an exception: but her salutation to
the Alps will certainly not be reprinted by me. The cultivated relatives
of dons and clergymen, widows driven to a subscription for a living,
elderly spinsters, aspiring housekeepers and governesses composed and
published volumes of respectable couplets. Now and then a considerable
financial success was made. Mrs. Barber, the pushing widow of a Dublin
tradesman, published in 1733 a handsome, even luxurious quarto, which is
still very common. The most noticeable thing in the book is the prefatory
poem by Constantia Grierson: ‘To Mrs. Mary Barber, under the name of
Sapphira, occasioned by the encouragement she met with in England to
publish her poems by subscription’.
Provincial ladies began to have volumes locally printed, and talent by
poverty depressed was studiously unearthed. Mary Leapor, who had a strain
of genius, was a domestic servant. Stephen Duck, the inspired Thresher,
had his analogue, though not his equal, in Mrs. Yearsley, the Bristol
Charwoman. This woman ought to be remembered for the most astounding
apostrophe on record. She addressed a poem to the Bristol Channel in
which she broke forth with
Hail! useful Channel....
The phrase, unique as it is, was significant of the age. It might be
used as a text for that prevailing (though, of course, not universal)
complacency of the middle Georgians, who often seemed to regard the
Universe as a laudably well-meaning branch of the lower orders, and
were quite capable of ‘Hail, gamesome Thunder’ and ‘Hail, pleasing
Lightning’. For prosiness and bathos Mrs. Yearsley was surpassed by
another lady whose work will not be found on succeeding pages. This was
Miss Jane Cave, whose _Poems on Various Subjects, Entertaining, Elegiac
and Religious_ were printed at Winchester in 1783, with a remarkable
frontispiece showing the author quill in hand and wearing a sort
of beribboned tea-cosy on top of a towering coiffure. Her volume is
dedicated to the Subscribers: ‘Ye gen’rous patrons of a female muse.’
And with some reason. There were nearly two thousand of them, grouped
by localities, ‘Oxford’, ‘Southampton’, ‘Bath’, &c. She, or the family
which employed her in some unnamed capacity, must have systematically
scoured the South of England for victims. Her character was evidently
forcible, if unattractive; but her powers did not justify her evident
self-complacency. She was especially fond of writing obituary poems on
deceased clergymen. Here are characteristic extracts from two of these:
Hark! how the Heav’nly Choir began to sing,
A song of praise, when _Watkins_ entered in.
Let ev’ry heart lift up a fervent pray’r,
That old Elijah’s mantle may be there,
That God from age to age may carry on
The amazing work which _Harris_ hath begun.
In her dedication she disclaims any pretension to be a ‘Seward, Steele,
or Moore’. The list is a sign of the times. Well-known poetesses now
existed in large numbers, and as the century drew to a close both their
fame and the claims to eminence of the best of them steadily increased.
There was Helen Maria Williams, whose _Ode on the Peace_, competently
written but now unreadable, was highly praised by Dr. Johnson, and one of
whose sonnets was committed to heart by Wordsworth. There was Elizabeth
Carter, translator of Epictetus, and a blue-stocking whose learning
really commanded respect. There was Charlotte Smith, the sonneteer, in
whose writing we can still find the vigour and grace that made her
celebrated in her own day. Anna Seward was equally well known. She did
not deserve it. Occasionally there is a faint trace of reality in her
work, as in the Sonnet on a December morning, 1782:
I love to rise ere gleams the tardy light,
Winter’s pale dawn;—and as warm fires illume
And cheerful tapers shine around the room,
Thro’ misty windows bend my musing sight,
Where, round the dusky lawn, the mansion white
With shutters clos’d, peers faintly thro’ the gloom,
That slow recedes;
But most of it is very bad; and I have not considered it necessary to
drag her into this book merely because she was once taken seriously. Mrs.
Opie, wife of the painter and author of _The Blind Boy_, was another
celebrity. Her _Lines Respectfully Inscribed to the Society for the
Relief of Persons Imprisoned for Small Debts_ are so characteristic of
the time that I wish I had space for them.
There were others even better known. Something of the old strangeness
still clung to the woman who wrote. Anna Seward was the Swan of Lichfield
and Susanna Blamire the Muse of Cumberland. But the age that produced
poets and dramatists of the status and popularity of Mrs. Barbauld,
Hannah More and Joanna Baillie—the last a poetess of really considerable
talents—was becoming reconciled. For a time the Mrs. Radcliffes might
prefer to sign their works whilst the Jane Austens remained anonymous;
but with the end of the epoch the old air of peculiarity faded, and with
the century of the Romantic Revival came an innumerable host of women
writers of some distinction, and three poetesses with claims to rank
with all but the greatest men. After Mrs. Browning, Christina Rossetti,
and Emily Brontë we hear no more, and could hear no more, of ‘a Female
Muse’.
* * * * *
That these three were greater poets than any Englishwomen before them
goes, I imagine, without saying. Almost all their best predecessors were
women who live by one or two poems. Amongst those poems scarcely one is
a genuine classic beyond the extraordinary group of great songs written
in the eighteenth century by Scotswomen, who seemed to have led more
independent lives than the Englishwomen of their time, and certainly sang
more boldly, confidently, and musically: the _Werena my Heart’s Licht_
of Lady Grisel Baillie, Mrs. Cockburn’s _The Flowers of the Forest_ and
Jane Elliot’s, the stirring lilts of Isobel Pagan the Ayrshire publican,
Lady Anne Barnard’s _Auld Robin Gray_, and _The Land of the Leal_ of Lady
Nairne.
Until the age of Joanna Baillie, the Matchless Orinda had the greatest
repute of them all, but there is more substantial achievement in the work
of Lady Winchilsea. The Countess had no fame in her lifetime, she did not
(as Orinda did) correspond with the literary men or exchange tributes
with the poets of her time. But it was not for nothing that Wordsworth
‘discovered’ and valued her. She kept her eye on Nature at a time when
the world in general had a conventional _parti pris_ about nature, and an
impressive power comes with her speech. This slight ‘difference’ in her
is not peculiar to her.
It may be left to others to discuss the particular aggregate value and
characteristics of our women poets, to debate the question as to whether
the ‘masculine imagination’ of Emily Brontë was a freak, to look for
especially ‘feminine’ characteristics in the contents of this anthology.
They are difficult and subtle questions. But I will call attention to one
point, and one only: and that is rather to the credit of the poetesses.
That they have, and must have, conformed to succeeding fashions in
writing is obvious—the poetic style of an age is a fruit of its general
civilization and way of thinking. But there is, I think, evidence that
when the convention favours highly regularized speech and restricted
choice of image, and when the convention favours a repression of
personality, women seem to be less prone than men to complete conformity.
Women from 1680 to 1750 may have written obediently in couplets or
quatrains, but in those of them who have any merit, personal experience
and personal passion are always peeping through, and the smooth surface
of the stock diction is always being broken by an unexpected word,
betraying obstinately individual taste and observation. Lady Winchilsea’s
cropping horse in the night has often been quoted. But we are equally
surprised to encounter the hot passion, the straightforward confessions
of suffering, the open autobiography that are exposed in the poems,
however technically imperfect, of Ephelia and Lady Wharton. Mary
Mollineux’s verses[1] (5th edition 1761) were read, no doubt by her
fellow Quakers, for generations after her death, but have never, so far
as I know, been noticed by any critic.
Mary Mollineux the Quaker died (under fifty) in 1695. She had suffered
in prison, and her religious poems—_Meditation_ and _Contemplation_,
though not those on Nadab and Abihu, might almost have been added to
the extracts in this book—are the work of a woman who, although very
learned, was primarily concerned with the feelings she was registering.
Totally indifferent to the manner of the time, she was strongly under
the influence of Donne. Mary Leapor and Mary Masters again illustrate
the refusal of even the lesser women to remain on the highest levels
of masculine stiffness. The detectives who are always chasing, farther
and farther back, into the Augustan Age for ‘heralds of Naturalism’,
scraps of really fresh and enthusiastic description of Nature, could
find things in both these poetesses. Mary Leapor (a domestic servant who
died of measles at 24 after teaching herself to write some very polished
verse) looked at Nature directly and keenly. A mere list of things she
mentions (_d._ 1746) astonishes the reader accustomed, in the minor
poets, to nothing more than groves, enamelled meads, bursting grapes,
roses and lilies. If you turn Mary Leapor’s pages you will find kingcups,
goldfinches, linnets, thyme, shining cottage tables, primroses, damsons,
poppies.... And how, in this passage of Mary Masters, a knowledge of and
love for the country struggles with the hoops and corsets of the mode:
Here the green Wheat disposed in even Rows
(A pleasing view) on genial Ridges grows,
Its clustered heads on lofty Spires ascend,
And frequent with delightful wavings bend,
There younger Barley shoots a tender Blade,
And spreads a level plain with verdant Shade.
The wreathing Pea extends its bloomy Pride,
And flow’ry Borders smile on either side.
She says, in terms, that whenever she looks at the country it produces
an excitement in her which makes her write verse: unfortunately her
intelligence was too weak, and only a few lines (not about Nature) were
found pointed enough for a representative selection. But she had that
touch of informality, and I think that even in the obscurest and worst
women poets of the time will almost always be found—what in the men’s
work is only sometimes to be found—expressions of personal joy and grief,
the healthy instinct to write about the things that the writer most
intensely feels.
* * * * *
As for the text, there are a few poems which I have cut. Two of Lady
Chudleigh’s are cut and one of Katherine Philips’s, two by Mary Masters
and the second of Mary Mollineux’s. The first poem from Lady Mary Montagu
is compressed, and Fanny Greville’s _Indifference_ and Mrs. Hemans’s
_Dirge_ are truncated as they are in Sir A. Quiller-Couch’s _Oxford Book
of English Verse_. I have modernized the spelling and typography of most
of the older poems, but have here and there kept it because I didn’t like
the look of some poems when I had modernized them.
There are, finally, a few problems to be cleared up on which I should
be glad of light. The identity of Fanny Greville, whose _Indifference_
is one of the most poignant lyrics of the eighteenth century, has
always baffled historians. Who was Mrs. Taylor who appeared in Dryden’s
_Miscellany_ and also in Mrs. Behn’s _Miscellany_ of 1683? Who was
_Ephelia_, first given her due in a charming essay by Mr. Gosse? There
were two editions of her poems. The first of 1679 is complete, the
edition of 1682 being padded out with poems, mostly good, by Rochester
and others, including even _Come Lasses and Lads_. A question of even
more interest to me personally is, who was Ann Collins? and one of more
interest still, where are Ann Collins’s poems? Her _Song_ I found in
Dyce (I recommend the reader to refer to it, remembering its date) and
the other poem I got out of a forgotten but good anthology of religious
verse compiled by James Montgomery. Dyce refers to her _Divine Songs and
Meditations_ (1653). Lowndes’s _Bibliographer’s Manual_ states that the
copy of the first edition sold at the Sykes and Heber Sales a century ago
was said to be unique; but he records also an edition of 1658. I can find
no further information, and neither edition is in the British Museum. I
should be glad of light on this and also on the other compositions of
Mary Oxlie, the friend of Drummond of Hawthornden.
For permission to reprint copyright works I owe thanks to Mrs. de Bary,
Miss Eva Gore Booth, Mrs. Cornford, Mrs. Tynan Hinkson, Mrs. Violet
Jacob, Miss Macaulay, and Mrs. Meynell: to Messrs. Wm. Blackwood & Sons
(Moira O’Neill, _Songs of the Glens of Antrim_); Mr. R. Cobden-Sanderson
(Sylvia Lynd); Mr. John Lane (Mrs. Woods); the Hon. Frederick Lawless
and Sir Issac Pitman & Sons (Emily Lawless); Messrs. Macmillan & Co.
(three copyright poems by Christina Rossetti); Sir Henry Newbolt and Mr.
Elkin Mathews (Mary Coleridge); Mr. John Murray and Mr. A. C. Benson (two
copyright poems by Charlotte Brontë); Mr. Clement Shorter (Dora Sigerson
Shorter, and one copyright poem by Emily Brontë); Messrs. Sidgwick &
Jackson (Miss Macaulay); Mr. T. Fisher Unwin (Amy Levy, _A London Plane
Tree_).
With this I may conclude the preface to a work which has occupied much
of my spare time for seven years. I may echo the words of Dyce in his
preface of 1827: ‘The inglorious toils of compilation seldom excite the
gratitude of readers, who only require to be amused, and are indifferent
as to what passed behind the scenes in the preparation of their
entertainment: but we feel an honest satisfaction in the reflection,
that our tedious chase through the Jungles of forgotten literature must
procure to this undertaking the good-will of our countrywomen’.
Only that ‘must’ looks rather strong.
J. C. SQUIRE.
FOOTNOTES
[1] They were published by her husband, with prefatory notices by him, by
her cousin Frances Owen, and by one Tryal Ryder. She was a saint and a
scholar, wrote Horatian Latin lyrics on religious subjects, and suffered
imprisonment for her faith in company with her husband. I cannot forbear
quoting from his account of her death: ‘The next Morning, about the ninth
Hour, I again thought she had been departing; but after a little Time,
somewhat recovering her Breath, and seeing me express, to Friends that
were present, something of my Concern for her, she said to me _Ne nimis
sollicitus esto_; that is, in English, _Be not thou overmuch careful,
or troubled_; which Advice took Impression in my Heart: And that was
the last Latin Sentence that she spake, that I know of, and she never
spake in Latin, in this Illness, that I remember except when Company was
present, that she would speak only to me: A little after, most of the
Company being gone out, I asked her, How she was? She answered, _Drawing
nearer and nearer_. And many sweet and loving Sentences she spake to me
that Day, and the Day next after; but afterwards was scarcely able to
answer to any Question, but continued mostly sleeping as it were, sweetly
and quietly: And on the third Day of the Eleventh Month, 1695, in the
Evening, she departed without the least Sigh or Groan.’
ANNE ASKEWE
c. 1520-1546 (martyred)
_1. The Balade whych Anne Askewe made and sange when she was in Newgate_
Lyke as the armed knyght
Appoynted to the fielde,
With thys world wyll I fyght,
And fayth shall be my shielde.
Faythe is that weapon stronge
Whych wyll not fayle at nede;
My foes therfor amonge
Therwith wyll I procede.
As it is had in strengthe
And force of Christes waye,
It wyll prevayle at lengthe,
Though all the devyls saye naye.
Faythe in the fathers olde
Obtayned ryghtwysnesse,
Whych make me verye bolde
To feare no worldes dystresse.
I now rejoyce in hart,
And hope byd me do so,
For Christ wyll take my part,
And ease me of my wo.
Thu sayst, Lorde, whoso knocke,
To them wylt thou attende;
Undo therfor the locke,
And thy stronge power sende.
More enmyes now I have
Than heeres upon my heed;
Lete them not me deprave,
But fyght thu in my steed.
On the my care I cast,
For all their cruell spyght,
I sett not by their hast,
For thu art my delyght.
I am not she that lyst
My anker to lete fall,
For everye dryslynge myst,
My shyppe substancyall.
Not oft use I to wryght
In prose nor yet in ryme,
Yet wyll I shewe one syght
That I sawe in my tyme.
I saw a ryall trone
Where Justyce shuld have sytt,
But in her stede was one
Of modye cruell wytt.
Absorpt was ryghtwysnesse
As of the ragynge floude;
Sathan in hys excesse
Sucre up the gyltelesse bloude.
Then thought I, Jesus, Lorde,
Whan thee shalt judge us all,
Harde is it to recorde
On these men what wyll fall.
Yet, Lorde, I the desyre,
For that they do to me:
Lete them not taste the hyre
Of their inyquyte.
QUEEN ELIZABETH
1533-1603
_2. On Her Enemies_
The doubt of future foes, exiles my present joy,
And wit me warnes to shun such snares as threaten mine annoy.
For falshood now doth flow, and subject faith doth ebbe,
Which would not be, if reason rul’d or wisdome wev’d the webbe.
But clowdes of tois untried, do cloake aspiring mindes,
Which turne to raigne of late repent, by course of changed windes.
The toppe of hope supposed, the roote of ruth will be,
And frutelesse all their graffed guiles, as shortly ye shall see.
Then dazeld eyes with pride, which great ambition blinds,
Shal be unseeld by worthy wights, whose forsight falshood finds,
The daughter of debate, that eke discord doth sowe
Shall reap no game where former rule hath taught still peace to growe.
No forreine banisht wight shall ancre in this port,
Our realme it brookes no strangers force, let them elsewhere resort.
Our rusty sword with rest, shall first his edge employ,
To polle their toppes that seeke such change and gape for joye.
_3. Answer to a Popish Priest, Giving Her Opinion on the Corporeal
Presence_
Christ was the Word that spake it;
He took the bread, and brake it:
And what that Word did make it,
That I believe, and take it.
LADY ELIZABETH CAREW
fl. 1613
_4. Chorus from ‘Mariam’_
’Tis not enough for one that is a wife
To keep her spotless from an act of ill;
But from suspicion she should free her life,
And bare herself of power as well as will.
’Tis not so glorious for her to be free,
As by her proper self restrain’d to be.
When she hath spacious ground to walk upon,
Why on the ridge should she desire to go?
It is no glory to forbear alone
Those things that may her honour overthrow:
But ’tis thankworthy, if she will not take
All lawful liberties for honour’s sake.
That wife her hand against her fame doth rear,
That more than to her lord alone will give
A private word to any second ear;
And though she may with reputation live,
Yet tho’ most chaste, she doth her glory blot,
And wounds her honour, tho’ she kills it not.
When to their husbands they themselves do bind,
Do they not wholly give themselves away?
Or give they but their body, not their mind,
Reserving that, tho’ best, for others’ prey?
No, sure, their thought no more can be their own,
And therefore should to none but one be known.
Then she usurps upon another’s right,
That seeks to be by public language grac’d;
And tho’ her thoughts reflect with purest light
Her mind, if not peculiar, is not chaste.
For in a wife it is no worse to find
A common body, than a common mind.
MARY OXLIE OF MORPET
Early 17th cent.
_5. To William Drummond of Hawthornden_
I never rested on the Muses bed,
Nor dipt my quill in the Thessalian fountaine,
My rustick Muse was rudely fostered,
And flies too low to reach the double mountaine.
Then do not sparkes with your bright Suns compare,
Perfection in a Womans work is rare;
From an untroubled mind should verses flow;
My discontents make mine too muddy show;
And hoarse encumbrances of houshold care;
Where these remaine, the Muses ne’er repaire.