Negotiating inclusion and exclusion through Poetry: the dynamics of Victorian women poets’ social, political and artistic networks

Abstract

This article/chapter aims to address the ways in which some major Victorian women poets, writing approximately between the 1820s and the 1890s in Britain, negotiated and experienced different forms of inclusion and exclusion within both emerging and well-established social, political and artistic networks or communities of women, and how those dynamics of power were in turn variously played out, manifested and explored in some of their respective poetic works, thus seeming to exhibit a sophisticated intellectual awareness at a time of almost exclusive male dominance. Starting with a brief analysis of the earlier poets Felicia Hemans and Letitia E. Landon, who created a niche and support structure for the writing, publication and dissemination of women’s poetry in a decisive historical context (the aftermath of the Napoleonic Wars), it will proceed to an exploration of mid-Victorian poets like Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Christina Rossetti, and their respective poetry, namely by looking at the first one’s spiritualism and her role in the formation of salons for the political campaigns of Italy (national unification) and the U.S.A. (abolition of slavery), and the second one’s social/religious initiatives within the ‘Anglican sisterhood’ solidarity group (around ‘fallen women’) and the eventual artistic creation of a ‘feminine Pre-Raphaelitism’. The article will conclude with an overview of some later poets’ feminist and artistic networks – namely those of Augusta Webster, Mathilde Blind and Amy Levy – in the larger context of the struggles for female suffrage and higher education, but also the one of creation of alternative artistic circles and selves within the male-dominated Decadent and Aesthetic movements. The article thus hopes to show how women’s political and artistic networking were connected and how this connection evolved in the particular context of women’s poetry in the nineteenth century, respectively the 1820s-30s, the 1840s-60s and the 1870s-90s, and whether the formation and constitution of these different groups and respective poetic movements, some of which were more exclusive and others more inclusive, resulted from/in a specific feminine dynamics of power.