An Anthology.
Women poets had always been oddities, dismissed as minor, disparaged for their morals.
Long regarded as an elevated language, and hence the stronghold of men, poetry in the seventy-year reign of Queen Victoria was unequivocally claimed as common territory by women. Early in the era some of England's finest poets and novelists still felt the necessity of a male pseudonym: Mary Ann Evans wrote as George Eliot; the Bronte sisters as Currer, Acton and Ellis Bell. By the end, poets such as Constance Naden and Dollie Radford from some five hundred women writers in print, in their own right, were tackling the age-old subject of love from a woman's satirical point of view, and exploring the radical dilemma of being the "New Woman".
With introduction, notes, selected criticism and chronologies of the poets and the times.
