A book of women's verse

There will be found here some authors and some poems which have appeared in no previous anthology of any kind, so far as I know; one or two authors never known, and many who have been forgotten since Dyce dug them up. In all but a very few instances I have procured and searched the original volumes even where I have ultimately selected poems which previous anthologists have chosen before me. They do not always, be it understood, choose the worst and leave the best for other people. But good work is not the only thing to which interest attaches, and while looking for poetesses I have come across many odd things. I may be permitted, while the night is yet young, so to speak, to make a few stray remarks about some of them.

There never was a time, whatever Mr. Morton may have supposed, when the Female Sex entirely escaped notice, or even ‘esteem’. But there was a time when it took no active share in literature. To-day we scarcely bother about the distinction between men and women writers. With thousands of women writing, with women’s verses in every magazine and women reporters in every newspaper office, when literary women congregate in clubs, and robust women novelists haggle with editors and discuss royalties with their male rivals, we take composition for granted as a feminine occupation. Even though we may not expect it we should be only mildly surprised if a female Plato or Shakespeare were to appear, and a second of the sort would cause no surprise at all. But it has all occurred very rapidly; it is less than a hundred years since Southey wrote to Charlotte Brontë ‘Literature cannot be the business of a woman’s life, and it ought not to be’. Before the days of Fanny Burney and Jane Austen the woman writer was a lonely figure, however different may have been the ways in which various generations regarded her. One looks back through the centuries and sees these poetesses scattered about in ones and twos, fine ladies, quiet countrywomen with taste and education, blue stockings, pet prodigies brought up in literary circles, stupid women vain of their accomplishments, timid women apologizing for their temerity; almost all of them inevitably and pathetically self-conscious about the opinion of the watching males around them. Nevertheless the degree of that self-consciousness seems to have varied. There was very little poetry—though we do not know about many beautiful anonymous Elizabethan poems—by women in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. One of them speaks to us direct on the subject: Mary Oxlie or Morpet, who wrote a dedicatory poem to her fellow-countryman Drummond of Hawthornden:

Perfection in a woman’s work is rare; From an untroubled mind should verses flow; My discontents make mine too muddy show; And hoarse encumbrances of household care, Where these remain the Muses ne’er repair.

But it did not, I think, occur to many early poetesses to apologize for writing or appeal for masculine mercy. Those who did write, of course, were mainly aristocrats, and whatever the standards of the rest of the population there has always been a good deal of democracy within the aristocracy, and an element of high culture amongst aristocratic women. Even in the eighteenth century, one of Horace Walpole’s lady friends might not have apologized for writing verses as humbler contemporaries of his felt impelled to do. But after the Commonwealth we do commonly find apologies or protestations in text or preface.

The authorized folio of Katherine Philips (Orinda) is very enlightening. I have some doubts as to the literary modesty of Orinda: one sees behind her poems a bouncing gushing creature of the kind not usually content to hide their lights under bushels. But she protests enough. The standard edition was published posthumously; there had been in her lifetime a pirated book full of errors which she vehemently repudiated:

‘The injury done me by that Publisher and Printer’, she wrote, ‘exceeds all the troubles that I remember I ever had ... it is impossible for malice itself to have printed those Rimes (you tell me gotten abroad so impudently) with so much abuse to the things, as the very publication of them at all, though they had been never so correct, had been to me.’ She was ‘that unfortunate person that cannot so much as think in private, that must have my imaginations rifled and exposed to play the Mountebanks, and dance upon the Ropes to entertain all the rabble; to undergo all the raillery of the Wits, and all the severity of the Wise, and to be the sport of some that can, and some that cannot read a Verse ... it hath cost me a sharp fit of sickness since I heard it ... a thousand pounds to have bought my permission for their being printed should not have obtained it.’

‘Sometimes’, she says, ‘I think that employment so far above my reach and unfit for my sex, that I am going to resolve against it for ever’, but ‘the truth is, I have an incorrigible inclination to that folly of riming, and, intending the effects of that humour, only for my own amusement in my own life’. Her editor, however, was proud to publish them: ‘Some of them would be no disgrace to the name of any Man that amongst us is most esteemed for his excellency in this kind, and there are none that may not pass with favour, when it is remembered that they fell hastily from the pen but of a Woman. We might well have called her the English Sappho.’ She would, he says, have been persuaded to publish a correct impression of herself:

But the small Pox, that malicious disease (as knowing how little she would have been concern’d for her handsomeness, when at the best) was not satisfied to be as injurious a Printer of her face, as the other had been of her poems, but treated her with a more fatal cruelty than the Stationer had them; for though he to her most sensible affliction surreptitiously possessed himself of a false Copy, and sent those children of her Fancy into the World, so martyred, that they were more unlike themselves than she could have been made had she escaped; that murtherous Tyrant, with greater barbarity seiz’d unexpectedly upon her, the fine Original, and to the much juster affliction of all the world, violently tore her out of it, and hurried her untimely to her grave, upon the 22 of June 1664, she being then but 31 [34] years of age. But he could not bury her in oblivion, for this monument which she erected for herself, will for ever make her to be honoured as the honour of her Sex, the emulation of ours, and the admiration of both.

Comment on the beauties of this last paragraph is beyond me. The commendatory poems prefaced to Orinda’s works echo these lofty strains. Lord Orrery wrote:

And as Our Sex resigns to Yours the due, So all of your bright Sex must yield to You.

Lord Roscommon pictured himself surrounded by lions on some Lybian plain:

The Magick of Orinda’s name, Not only can their fierceness tame, But, if that mighty word I once rehearse, They seem submissively to roar in Verse.

A pseudonymous lady, more vehement than her subject, argued that environment (she didn’t know the word) made all the difference between the sexes:

Trained up to Arms, we Amazons have been, And Spartan Virgins strong as Spartan Men: Breed Women but as Men, and they are these; Whilst Sybarit Men are Women by their eyes.... Nature to Females freely doth impart That, which the Males usurp, a stout, bold heart; Thus Hunters female Beasts fear to assail And female Hawks more mettal’d than the male.

This feminine anticipation of Mr. Kipling is followed by the assertion that since souls were equal it was obviously not the ‘he or she’ that wrote poetry.

It is a fine collection of tributes. A poem, with noble passages, by the neglected Flatman comes into it, and there are two interesting Odes by Cowley. One begins:

We allow’d you beauty, and we did submit To all the tyrannies of it. Ah cruel Sex! will you depose us too in Wit?

The other, full of the oddest tropes, states that:

The World did never but two Women know Who, one by fraud, the other by wit did rise To the two tops of Spiritual dignities; One Female Pope of old, one Female Poet now.

The panegyric was impressive; but it was all somewhat patronizing, addressed as though to a flying pig. There is an air of strain about Orinda’s nearest contemporary rival. The gifted Anne Killigrew, who, dying young, was the subject of a great ode by Dryden, had to write a long poem protesting against the ‘saying that her verses were made by another’:

Like Aesop’s painted jay, I seem’d to all, Adorn’d in plumes, I not my own could call.

She produced Orinda as evidence that women could be good poets, and she said quaintly of Alexander the Great:

Nor will it from his Conquests derogate, A Female Pen his Acts did celebrate.

There is nothing diffident about the attitude of Aphra Behn, the tough, audacious, fearless young widow who forced her way to dramatic success under the Restoration, and who was the first of our professional women writers. She has been rather unfairly treated by historians. It is true that her plays are as gross, in subject and speech, as any of her time: possibly her coarseness was the defect of the quality which enabled her to fight her lone hand in the Grub Street of the day. But there is a hearty straightforwardness about her which is lacking in some of the men of the Restoration, she had a gift for broad, strong characterization, she was honest, rough, kind, affectionate, not at all cynical, and she wrote English of an Elizabethan lustiness. She did not apologize, she counter-attacked. She was not allowed to forget her sex but she soundly thumped those who reminded her that her plays and poems were ‘writ by a woman’. Here is a passage from the Epistle to the Reader which introduces The Dutch Lover: