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COPYRIGHT 2000 Boston University
Paula R. Feldman, ed. British Women Poets of the Romantic Era: An Anthology. Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997. Pp. xxxvi+879. $60.00 cloth.
"The Ladies," John Hamilton Reynolds tells readers of the Athenaeum, "have been dealing largely and profitably at the shop of the Muses." Indeed, from his perspective in 1832, it appears that "Apollo is beginning to discharge his retinue of sprawling men-servants, and to have handmaids about his immortal person, to dust his rays and polish his bow and fire-irons. If the great he-Creatures intend to get into place again," Reynolds suggests, "they must take Mrs. Bramble's advice, and `have an eye to the maids.'" This passage, used by Paula Feldman as an epigraph for the introduction to her much-anticipated anthology of women poets, could be spun, turned and adapted ever so slightly, and we might have an apt description of the current state of romantic studies: the women writers of the romantic period (as we tend to refer to Reynolds' "Ladies") "have been dealing largely and profitably [in] the shop" of romantic literary criticism. As Feldman, citing Reynolds and his "nervous[ness]," makes clear, women writers were "a force to be reckoned with in [late-eighteenth- and] early-nineteenth-century Britain" (xxv). Scholarship centered on these women writers, on both the recovery of their work and the critical and historical inquiries it has fueled, has been just such a force in recent years, one met at times (to me, ironically) with a similar degree of nervousness, in the field of British romanticism.
Feldman's British Women Poets of the Romantic Era: An Anthology and Harriet Devine Jump's Women's Writing of the Romantic Period, 1789-1836: An Anthology are vital, though extremely different, contributions to this growing body of scholarship. Wishing to counter that most material of difficulties, the availability of women's texts, Feldman and Jump make a vast array of writings from the period more easily accessible. Their anthologies are intended, as both editors explain in their opening remarks, to provide a forum for voices traditionally excluded from the romantic canon. Enriching the resources for consideration, they hope to enable further work--more extensive and more informed work--on these women writers and on romanticism itself both in our classrooms and in our research. Given the widespread and on-going debates about canon reform that new or newly revised anthologies have catalyzed in romantic studies, we are...
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