(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;