Part 1

A Book of Women’s Verse

Oxford University Press

_London_ _Edinburgh_ _Glasgow_ _Copenhagen_ _New York_ _Toronto_ _Melbourne_ _Cape Town_ _Bombay_ _Calcutta_ _Madras_ _Shanghai_

Humphrey Milford Publisher to the UNIVERSITY

A Book of Women’s Verse

Edited with a Prefatory Essay by J. C. Squire

Oxford At the Clarendon Press 1921

TO ALICE MEYNELL

PREFACE

I am not prepared with any philosophic justification for the compilation of this book. Poetry is poetry, whoever writes it. But it is a fact, at least so far as my observation goes, that people do feel curiosity about women’s contributions to the arts, and that this curiosity is common to all kinds of persons, from those who exaggerate the differences between the sexes, to those who seem to think that they can eradicate them. I myself felt this curiosity when I conceived this anthology: and it would be stupid not to admit it.

It is not the first collection of the sort that has been made, but so far as I am aware it has only one predecessor which can be taken seriously and that is over a hundred years old. The principal collections which have come to my notice may be briefly recorded in chronological order.

(1) _Poems by Eminent Ladies_, published in two volumes in 1755 and said to have been edited by Colman and Bonnel Thornton. The preface opens ‘These volumes are perhaps the most solid compliment that can possibly be paid the Fair Sex. They are a standing proof that great abilities are not confined to the men, and that genius often glows with equal warmth, and perhaps with more delicacy, in the breast of a female’. The intention was generous, but the ‘standing proof’ does not stand on these volumes. No research had been done for them, and the eighteen ladies represented in them were mainly bad poetastresses of the time. A reprint, with additions, appeared in 1780.

(2) _Specimens of British Poetesses, Selected and Chronologically Arranged_ by the Rev. Alexander Dyce (1827), was the earliest product of the right happy and copious industry of that learned man. It is the only book in the list with any pretensions to scholarship, and any man who follows in Dyce’s footsteps must be struck both by the range of his research and the judicious manner in which he chose his extracts from the books he found. His work is not beyond criticism. There were poetesses, earlier than himself, whom he missed, of whom Lady Nairne is an outstanding example. He was rather too eager to get in something by any Female versifier whom he discovered, and distinctly over-generous to his own contemporaries. Moreover he gave feminine authorship the benefit of the doubt when the doubt in its favour was very slender. His evidence for the attribution of ‘Defiled is my namefull sore’ to Anne Boleyn was remarkably slight. There is not much more for the ascription of the celebrated sporting treatises to Juliana Berners. Neither of these reputed poetesses appears in the present volume, for the simple reason that I do not believe in them. Even on his own ground Dyce might have been surpassed by somebody standing on Dyce’s shoulders. But had his work been perfect, a hundred years, which have seen the prime of the three greatest of English poetesses, have passed since he published it. I may at this point acknowledge my debt to him, although the poems I have taken from him are very few.

(3) _The Female Poets of Great Britain, chronologically arranged with copious selections and critical remarks_ by Frederic Rowton, 1848. To this volume, large as it is, no such debt will be acknowledged. Mr. Rowton, on his title page, claims the authorship of other works entitled _The Debater_ and _Capital Punishment Reviewed_; if literary piracy were treated as maritime piracy is, one could understand his interest in the death penalty. He was a thief, a hypocrite, a most oily and prolix driveller: a bad specimen of what a modern polemist has called ‘the louse on the locks of literature’. This heat against a man long dead may seem excessive; but after all one could not say so much if he were still alive, and his brazenness has probably never been noticed before. Listen to his Preface. ‘Of our _male_ Poets there are (to say the least of it) histories enough. Johnson, Campbell, Aikin, Anderson, Southey, and others, have done due honour to the genius of the rougher sex; and have left us—so far as they have gone—nothing to be desired. But where are the memorials of the Female mind?... One or two small works (among which Mr. Dyce’s _Specimens of British Poetesses_ is the only one of merit and research) have been devoted to the subject, it is true; but even the worthiest of these productions is at best but incomplete. It cannot surely be pretended that this neglect of our Female Poets is attributable to any lack of genius in the sex. In these enlightened days it may certainly be taken for granted that women have souls ... we should be deeply ashamed of ourselves for so long withholding from them that prominent place in the world’s esteem which is so undoubtedly their due.’ What a Chadband! We have here the very accents of that speech about the beasts of the field and the human boy.—‘Are you a bird of the air? No!’ ‘That prominent place in the world’s esteem!’ One might imagine he was talking about some obscure and unnoticed tribe of the brute creation: badgers perhaps, or Dartford warblers. He was for the first time calling the attention of the human race to the existence of women, which could only be demonstrated, apparently, by putting their works into anthologies. But the most notable thing is that like all his kind he was not only a humbug but a sly robber. That patronizing parenthesis about Dyce, without a word of acknowledgment, is the one reference in his preface to a man on whose labours he battened. Half his book—it might be very well if he admitted it, for Dyce was competent—came bodily out of Dyce. That was the only part of it worth printing. Dyce did all his research for him; the rest of his huge book was filled with the maundering prettinesses of early nineteenth-century writers. His notes on the old poetesses are Dyce’s rewritten, often not even that; that he was conscious of his dishonest intent is proved by the way in which here and there, without any sensible reason, he changes with obtuse cunning the order of the transcribed extracts. He had not even the sense to see that at one place he copied from Dyce a highly ridiculous misprint!

If his earlier notes are certainly pilfered, his later are as certainly his own. Pages of gush are devoted to the numerous geniuses of his time. Of Mrs. Margaret Hodson he says that ‘Her narratives flow on as gracefully and smoothly as Scott’s: she closely resembles that great writer, indeed, in many respects, although as regards dramatic skill she is certainly superior.... One cannot but feel surprised that a lady of our peaceful age should be so thoroughly imbued with the martial spirit of our warlike ancestors. The fact proves not merely the strength of the human imagination, but also that the imagination is not sexual’. Of Mary Howitt he says that ‘As a versifier, as a moralist, and as a philosopher, she may safely challenge comparison with any writer of her own sex and with most of the writers of the other sex.... Mrs. Howitt is indeed a writer of whom England may be, and will be, eternally proud’. ‘There is in Miss Cook’, he says, ‘that fine eloquence which grows as it advances’. But I may be deemed to have celebrated sufficiently the character of this man and I come to the next.

(4) _Women’s Voices_ by Mrs. William Sharp, 1887. This is an equally bad compilation in its way, happily a different way. Mrs. Sharp says ‘There has not, so far as I am aware, been any anthology formed with the definite aim to represent each of our women-poets by one or more essentially characteristic poems’. She may have been unacquainted with Dyce: at all events she left out half his most interesting things. Her book, terribly dedicated ‘To all Women’, looks like a feminist manifesto: it is even more than Morton’s crowded with the ephemeral productions of contemporaries. They were only, many of them, of the eighties; but they have faded now.

* * * * *

Possibly there are ephemerides in this volume also. But I have done my best to keep them out. My criteria may be briefly explained. From the moderns I have taken only poems which appear to me meritorious; but in the earlier portion of the work there will be found some poems put in merely as curiosities or because they are the best representatives of their time that can be found. I have left out a great many of Dyce’s poetesses. I could not bring myself to print Diana Primrose, in spite of her lovely name, or the monstrously ingenious Mary Fage, of the seventeenth century though she was. But I may say quite frankly that if I had come across, say, a poem of Chaucer’s day indisputably by a woman it would have gone in even though it were the weakest doggerel. But I know nothing as early as that. Professor Gollancz, I believe, thinks _Pearl_ was by a woman; perhaps it was, but we don’t know. I have omitted, as I said, verse imputed to Juliana Berners and Anne Boleyn. By the same token I have left out _Hardy-Knute_, which may or may not have been by Lady Wardlaw. I do not think it a great loss, for it is long and does not live up to its opening. _There’s nae luck_ would have gone in had I really felt sure that Jean Adams was a likelier author than Mickle. I should have been glad to have included the beautiful lines attributed to James I’s noble and unfortunate daughter, Elizabeth of Bohemia, if I had seen satisfactory evidence for the attribution. Mrs. Tighe’s long _Psyche_, a poem of respectable accomplishment, I searched for quotable extracts, finding none; her poem about a lily I rejected after hesitation. I found myself reluctantly disinclined to include anything by Margaret Fuller or George Eliot. Beyond these and a few moderns I do not believe that I had much hesitation.

* * * * *

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_:

Indeed that day ’twas acted first, there comes me into the Pit, a long lither, phlegmatick, white, ill-favour’d wretched Fop, an officer in Masquerade newly transported with a Scarf and Feather out of France, a sorry Animal that has nought else to shield it from the uttermost contempt of all Mankind, but that respect which we afford to Rats and Toads, which though we do not well allow to live, yet when considered as parts of God’s Creation, we make honourable mention of them. A thing, Reader—but no more of such a Smelt: This thing, I tell ye, opening that which serves it for a mouth, out issued such a noise as this to those that sate about it, that they were to expect a usefull Play, God damn him, for it was a woman’s.... I would not for a world be taken arguing with such a propertie as this; but if I thought there were a man of such tolerable parts, who could upon mature deliberation distinguish well his right hand from his left, and justly state the difference between the number of sixteen and two, yet had this prejudice upon him; I would take a little pains to make him know how much he errs. For waving the examination why women having equal education with men, were not as capable of knowledge, of whatsoever sort as well as they: I’ll only say as I have to such and before, that Plays have no great room for that which is men’s great advantage over women, that is Learning; we all know that the immortal Shakespeare’s Plays (who was not guilty of much more of this than often falls to women’s share) have better pleas’d the World than Johnson’s works, though by the way ’tis said the Benjamin was no such Rabbi neither, for I am inform’d that his Learning was but Grammar high (sufficient indeed to rob poor Salust of his best orations); and it hath been observ’d that they are apt to admire him most confoundedly, who have just such a scantling of it as he had.... Then for their musty rules of Unity, and God knows what besides, if they meant anything, they are enough intelligible and as practicable by a woman.

This was in 1673. Forty years afterwards we get a side-light from the preface to Mary Monk’s poems, written after her death by her father Lord Molesworth. The preface takes the form of a dedication (fifty pages) to Carolina, Princess of Wales, who is greeted with this ambiguous salutation: ‘The true value, you have for Liberty, is so remarkable, that one wou’d wonder where your Royal Highness (who has been bred up in a part of Europe, but slenderly furnish’d with just notions of that great Blessing) cou’d have acquired it’. Lord Molesworth repeats with approval charges recently made against women—this was two hundred years ago and on the verge of the eighteenth century!