Women & Romanticism Vol3

Introduction

First published in 2006. Women and Romanticism’s third volume covers Poetics, the Novel and Authorship and brings together work on poetics, the novel and authorship. Joanna Baillie and Elizabeth Hamilton wrote manifestoes not terribly different in kind from those produced by William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and excerpts from their work are included here. But Romantic-era women writers more often make statements about art and poetics covertly, in poems and in tales as well as in biographical writing, and the editor acknowledges this tendency in the third volume by drawing upon these genres.

Historical Context

Until the 1980s, a five-volume collection of materials on ‘Women and Romanticism’ would have been inconceivable, since Romantic studies largely restricted itself to a consideration of the major male poets of the period (William Blake, William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Lord Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley and John Keats). When women were present in accounts of Romanticism, they were considered in terms of their literary function (as objects of representation), or in relation to their domestic (as mothers, daughters, wives and lovers of the authors).

Notable Women Writers

Indeed, the first Romantic women writers to enter academic discourse were those with familial connections to the canonized poets: Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Shelley and Dorothy Wordsworth. Other writers of interest in the 1970s included Frances Burney and Jane Austen.