An anthologist of women’s poetry from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century has the pleasure and advantage of dealing with relatively little-known poetry, of a remarkably wide range – here are to be found both love-song and feminist polemic, witty satire and religious rhapsody, bawdy fun and grave meditation. Not everyone might approve of an anthology deliberately confined to writers of one sex, but the fact is that far too few ordinary readers and students have been able to get a fair sense of the variety and vitality of English women’s poetry over these centuries. Quite simply, there are some very good poems in here, and some remarkable poets, that should be better known. Yet, often, it has hardly been apparent that they were there at all. Apart from a handful of the romanticized famous, even the more considerable have had to wait until fairly recently for sound editions, let alone general recognition. To some extent, of course, it has been cultural prejudice (conscious or unconscious, and shared by women) that has led to women poets’ near-absence from the standard, period anthologies (though that is now becoming less the case); partly they were elbowed out by the acknowledged major authors, partly not recognized by a taste unfamiliar with feminine attitudes and themes. Here, at any rate, is a selection, made not to illustrate any thesis, but simply to bring together some lively and engaging poems that should appeal to many modern readers, and provide an introduction to an important and neglected element in English poetic history.

We need to extend our sense of the history or pattern of English poetry, to bring in the overlooked. There is no one canon of English poetry – rather, a constantly shifting set of engagements and valuations produced by changing responses to contemporary life: as we see the present differently, so we cannot but see the past differently. An apparent absence proves not to have been a vacancy: muted voices become audible, individual, various, in a dialect different but recognizable and intriguing.

In this volume, spelling and typographic conventions regarding the use of capitals, italics and so on, have been brought into line with modern usage (though punctuation is usually unchanged); while this makes for greater accessibility, one should not forget what varying appearances suggest – that different linguistic usages are inseparable from changing cultures and assumptions. We are dealing with products of a patriarchal society evolving over some four hundred years. It is important to remember how much our experiences, and the words for them, are culturally shaped and conditioned: friendship, love, marriage, husband, wife, home – all have had different significances, for both sexes at different times. We should not read these poems assuming that their writers felt quite what we might feel with or through their words. Their voices echo out of the past: though the experiences and responses are recognizable, we may not catch everything they say.

Obviously, the primary psychological development of the sexes differs, producing different conceptions of interiority, identity and relationships. Even though these are partially products of the orderings developed through the shared language, one must recognize that access to and usage of these discourses is not the same for men and women. Whole ranges of behaviour – linguistic, social, sexual, economic – have been unavailable to women, virtually unthinkable, precluded by various circumstances: lack of education, religious or class proscriptions or inhibitions, assumptions of innate incapacity, as well as, for many, by lack of time, money or access. Necessarily this has affected attitudes to writing, both fundamentally – as to whether one writes, or why, or for whom – and more obviously, in relation to conventions that are gender-oriented, such as Renaissance Petrarchist love-poetry, or Romantic myths of Mother Nature. The cultural myths, concerns and changes of their times appear in women’s verse, but often differently, or indirectly. Women might be seen as constituting a major social grouping within the changing cultures of their times, with – like other groupings – varying access to and representation in the discourses of those times, and with varying degrees of awareness of constituting such a group (awareness of other affinities, such as of class or religion, sometimes being more significant). One cannot readily speak of a tradition of women’s poetry during these years – writers would need a stronger sense of a common pursuit among predecessors and contemporaries – let alone a movement, except perhaps towards the end, though some continuities and developments might be traced. Some common themes do appear in women’s poetry, of course – friendship between women; complaints against male dominance, with demands for equality and self-determination; love (variously understood); children; domestic life; sympathy with oppressed groups; the necessity of self-expression (or is it self-creation?) through writing – but changing in emphasis with changing circumstances.

The Renaissance humanist tradition of the educated lady is represented here by Queen Elizabeth, Mary Herbert and Mary Wroth: religious or moral writing was all that might be approved for ladies then; courtiers might write for self-advertisement and career advancement, but such objectives were in any case inappropriate or irrelevant to the women. The lower orders were rarely literate, with necessarily limited horizons: Isabella Whitney’s education and literary ambitions were both very unusual. Social tension about gender roles and women’s position developed during the earlier seventeenth century, as other social, religious and political strains increased; merchant-class Nonconformity was to prove beneficial to women’s interests, in encouraging literacy for independent Bible study, while devotional and ‘prophetic’ writing flourished (one might think of An Collins, or Anne Bradstreet); the Civil War provided many occasions for self-assertion, as Margaret Cavendish’s activities might suggest. The Restoration’s brief openness to personal, economic and sexual expression, and new demand for entertainment, were in practice mixed blessings. Sexual activity was flaunted (Behn, Ephelia, Pilkington – Montagu: but she was an aristocrat, and could get away with it!), but also provoked prim reactions, whereby it became even less respectable for ladies to publish (Cavendish was derided, Philips, Ephelia and Finch all published pseudonymously). For some years, the theme of women’s rights in the face of husbands’ absolute powers became almost a minor genre, to be exercised by any self-respecting woman writer (Chudleigh, Elizabeth Tollet), before the blanket of Whig complacency settled down.

The eighteenth century saw increasing numbers of middle-class women taking up writing – especially of novels (Charlotte Smith) – to satisfy the growing numbers of literate and (involuntarily) leisured women of that class, actually discouraged from independent activity and increasingly confined to a private, domestic life, subject to growing cults of motherhood and refined manners. Some, such as Mary Jones, or Fanny Burney, associated themselves with important male writers, such as Pope, Richardson and Johnson; others with ladies’ literary and philanthropic groups, producing Popean satire or sympathy with the deserving oppressed – slaves, chimney-sweeps, lower-class women writers (such as Leapor and the milk-woman poet Ann Yearsley) – while discouraging serious social questioning (Hannah More). The lower orders, trapped by poor education and by hard labour away from home, in agriculture, domestic service or the mills, produced the social complaint (Collier). The Nonconformist, progressive tradition continued to be one of major and increasing importance for women writers (Barbauld, Taylor)

The literary lady became increasingly established (More, Barbauld, Hemans); from the Restoration onwards, women poets were not neglected by reviewers, and many – More, Hemans, Adelaide Procter (reputedly Queen Victoria’s favourite poet), Ingelow – sold very well, while others – Barbauld, Barrett Browning – won considerable intellectual respect. However, pressures for respectability, sublimation and self-repression also flourished, with smothering and distorting effects (in three different ways, Hemans, Wordsworth, Rossetti). Political and intellectual developments associated with, for example, Mary Wollstonecraft, Mme de Staël and Rousseau, together with Romantic attitudes to Nature, the will and imagination, motivated and unsettled others (Barrett Browning, the Brontës) – the imagination and sexuality merging unnervingly. Many, of course, worked within Victorian values of optimism and good works (Procter, Ingelow, Greenwell – where a sublimated sexual energy is discernible); some indeed, effaced their female identities, almost subversively, behind male pseudonyms: Currer Bell, Michael Field, George Eliot. Nevertheless, as the century proceeds, a more independently feminine, and even feminist voice and sensibility become apparent. A repressive social orthodoxy provoked increasingly a melancholy, even morbid note in women’s verse (preceding, if later merging with, fin de siealtle sen timent); sometimes this is lost in the liberating energy of radical and suffragist movements (Guggenberger, Mathilde Blind, Meynell), sometimes, a deeper alienation is suggested (Levy, Coleridge).

With Mary Coleridge the volume concludes, on the brink of the great development in women’s self-awareness, associated with suffragist and feminist movements, and the enormous expansion and flourishing of women’s poetry in this century. That, too great for inclusion in this volume, is well represented elsewhere. Regrettably, many interesting poets have had to be excluded – yet again; but for these writers, mostly ‘too little and too lately known’, here are some indications of what they were capable of, and of where more may be found.