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