Eighteenth - Century Women Poets and Their Poetry: Inventing Agency, Inventing Genre

It is no exaggeration to say that Paula R. Backscheider's Eighteenth-Century Women Poets and Their Poetry: Inventing Agency, Inventing Genre does for eighteenth-century women's poetry what has been done for women's novels over the last two decades or so by scholars including Ros Ballaster, Terry Castle, Catherine Gallagher, Jane Spencer, and Paula R. Backscheider herself in the anthology co-edited with John Richetti, Popular Fiction by Women, 1660-1730 (1996): brings attention to the richness, the complexity, and the individuality of women's poetry, without ever ceasing to note how women interacted with their male and female contemporaries in public and private forms of poetic discourse. In her conclusion, she indicates how little we know about eighteenth-century women's poetry and how small a vocabulary we have for talking about poems (and poets) that do not fit into preexisting categories:

Surely a poet does not have to scream or thunder to feel and convey powerful depths of feeling. And for every dreary, mopey woman who has been anthologized there is an amazingly creative, disrespectful, funny spirit like Mary Savage whom no one has bothered to immortalize. (401)

These lines encapsulate some of the rationale behind Backscheider's project. In just over four hundred pages of brilliant, carefully researched analysis, she has skillfully managed to develop a two-pronged theoretical approach to eighteenth-century women's poetry by which she simultaneously provides correctives for the invisibility of these female authors and for the stereotypical, selective anthologizations of their works that have colored our ideas of women's poetic productions since the 1750s. Illustrating either of these points would be a major accomplishment (and Backscheider does both); remarkably, she also develops complex, nuanced approaches to different genres used by women, provides social and biographical contexts for a number of women writers ranging from recognizable figures like Anne Finch and Charlotte Smith to still largely unknown authors like Mary Darwell and Jane Brereton, and scrutinizes women's poetic accomplishments in ways that clearly demonstrate how much work remains to be done on their lives, works, and place in literary history.

In part, Backscheider's book seems a natural continuation of Margaret J. M. Ezell's Writing Women's Literary History (1993), a text that Backscheider refers to at several points. Like Ezell, Backscheider critiques the anthologization processes that began in no small part during the mid-eighteenth century and have continued into our own time, as women's poetry has been cut or selected in ways that reinforce stereotypes or that endorse a particular view of women's literary work. For example, poems that express either activist sentiments like Finch's "The Introduction" or female participation in modes associated with misogyny appear far more often in texts like the Norton Anthology of English Literature than do the many remarkable examples of women’s religious poetry or nature poetry which could easily hold their own alongside the works of male contemporaries—a problem of "perverse selection and abridgement" that has led us to view women's poetry as circumscribed by its ideological trappings, when women were in fact writing in all of the major modes of the period, with much success, beauty, and even brilliance (393).

Backscheider offers her work as an extension to John Sitter's influential study Literary Loneliness in Eighteenth-Century England (1982). Throughout Eighteenth-Century Women Poets and Their Poetry, she emphasizes that women developed the same themes of retreat as men did in their poetry, and she goes further to suggest that "in this transitional moment and out of diverse poetic kinds, the retirement poem provided a theme and a subject that women adapted from what men were doing and passed along greatly enriched" (267). The examples that Backscheider draws on to illustrate this point about retreat poetry include poems by Mary Chudleigh, Finch, Elizabeth Tollett, Elizabeth Carter, Mary Whatley Darwell, Sarah Dixon, Jane Brereton, Mary Chandler, Catherine Rebecca Meyers, and Hester Mulso Chapone, many of which she suggests are "representative of women's distinctive work in this literary kind" (234). Such complexity of "poetic kinds" and exchange between male and female poet is not exclusive to retreat poetry, although this is one major mode to which Backscheider has added considerably with her chapter on the form and its female practitioners. In other chapters, she addresses other kinds including friendship poetry and the ode to make similar points that suggest a need for us to look more closely at our assumptions about poetic form, poetic subject matter, and poets.

The format of Backscheider's book allows her to bring together recovery work, genre criticism, biographical studies, and historical contexts related to eighteenth-century women poets and their poetry. By structuring her analyses around forms instead of following a chronological progression, she draws attention to the many roles that female poets had: they could be producing friendship poetry, poetry on poetry, poetry about "the woman question" (99), hymns, religious poetry, retirement poetry, elegies, or sonnets—and sometimes they were engaged in all of these poetic endeavors, whether simultaneously or at different moments during their careers.

The temporal and social range of poets who Backscheider examines is impressive, and for each of the poets (as she notes in her conclusion) she has read "the entire poetic output of each woman" (396). Her study of Anne Finch has—in and of itself—all of the complexity that one might expect from a monograph devoted entirely to the poet, and surely her discussions of the limited availability of poetry by even the most celebrated of these women (such as Finch and Lady Mary Wortley Montagu) will prompt new editions of their works. She devotes large sections to Finch, Elizabeth Singer Rowe, Brereton, and Smith, and she provides extensive poetic selections by these women as well as from poetry by some of the many lesser-known poets she mentions.

Few quibbles can be made about this book. Ambitious in its scope but careful in its methodology and meticulous in its details, the book rarely strains or seems unclear. Chapter four, “Hymns, Narratives, and Innovations in Religious Poetry” begins with a striking example of Backscheider’s skill at bringing together small details into wholly satisfying arguments with large-scale implications. She writes: "New genres are created when old ones do not meet the needs of writers and their culture, and Rowe is a fascinating example of this phenomenon" (123). Genre creation, which has been considered in connection with the eighteenth-century novel, becomes one of women's very significant contributions to eighteenth-century poetry according to Backscheider, and the evidence she gives to support her claims is provocative, convincing, and flawlessly illustrated.

With Eighteenth-Century Women Poets and Their Poetry, Backscheider has ably combined rigorous recovery work with theoretical interpretation. She provides meaty excerpts from eighteenth-century women's poetic output (she makes some poems available for the first time outside of a research library or archive) and compiles a biographical dictionary of eighteenth-century female poets, which would have been enough to make her book indispensable to anyone interested in women's writing, eighteenth-century poetry, material culture, and female agency. She also gives us new ways of reading, situating, and interpreting eighteenth-century women poets and their poetry.