Women Writers of theRomantic Period:

Rewriting the Masculine World

Joshua Gnana Raj PPh D Research Scholar (English)

Dr B J GeethaAssistant Professor of English

■ The Romantic era to be precise, began with the advent of William Wordsworth publishing his Lyrical Ballads in 1798 and was ended by the crowning of Queen Victoria in 1839.

■ John Clare, son of a farm labourer who wrote on the issues of the countryside and on the lamentations of the changes that was being taken place then in rural England

■ George Crabbe is yet another poet during this period, Lord Byron is said to have admired Crabbe.

■ Recently “In the past three decades, scholars of reading history and print culture have made impressive strides in the study of formerly neglected genres and authors, including aesthetic commentary by Romantic era women writers” (Waters 1).

■ Wordsworth’s Lyrical Ballads which:… is considered a landmark in Romantic literary theory that broke new ground in

form and content. Yet far fewer realize that in her “Introductory Discourse” to Plays on the Passion (1798), Joanna Baillie articulated a number of Wordsworth’s most innovative ideas … . (Waters 3) It develops a theory for the Closet Drama

Anna Letitia Barbauld - a poet, essayist, educator, author of children’s literature, devotional writer, political pamphleteer, and a literary critic.

■ Her The British Novelists; with An Essay; and Prefaces, Biographical and Critical has given prefaces to the works by Elizabeth Inchbald and other writers of her times.

■ On the Origin and Progress of a Novel-Writing contradicted Samuel Johnson’s view that novels must be serving as an educational and moral purpose. Barbauld says that entertainment is what must be the ultimate goal of fiction. But women writers often hid behind anonymity and were “universally regarded as lacking in the judgement necessary to criticism, that they never enjoyed the kind of professional literary career that was attained by at least some men” (Waters 4).

■ But for Barbauld’s case it has been noted that “criticism appears to have sustained her financially while providing her, according to her niece and first biographer, with an intellectual and emotional lifeline at the time of her husband’s mental collapse and eventual suicide” (Waters 10).

• Once she was recruited to write criticism, but she disliked writing it, yet she began to write on prefaces for individual plays. Inchbald’s essays at first appeared as individual instalments.

• She was attacked for stepping out of the feminine boundary, for judging a man’s work. George Coleman was one such person to be displeased with her assessment and had written a sarcastic letter questioning her judgement on how she could invade the usual man made criticism. Inchbald then gave a witty reply by giving out her role as being a critic and on her assessment of the work by Coleman.

• She also authored two novels A Simple Story and Nature and Art, and both were well received.

• Thomas Longman was approached by Inchbald to pen down introductions and she had done such in weekly instalments for over two years which amounts to one hundred and twenty five introductions. Her criticism includes the ironic essay On Novel Writing. Inchbald remarks of Henry IV, Pt 1. As “a play which all men admire, and which most women dislike” (Waters 66).

Maria Jane Jewsbury - wrote poems, fiction, satire, reflective essays, and literary criticism.

■ Her first publication was a poem which appeared in a local newspaper, which was satirical and thus began her writing career.

■ She anonymously brought out the work Phantasmagoria; or, Sketches of Life and Literature, which was a two volume collection of poems, literary sketches, and short fictions which was dedicated to William Wordsworth. Wordsworth himself praised the work.

■ But Jewsbury suffered from a life threatening bout of illness, like Mary Lamb had also had. She was in the later stages was married to William Kew Fetcher and had sailed to India, but seven months after arriving in Bombay she died of cholera.

■ Jewsbury talks of the writing style of Jane Austen.

Lucy Aikin - poet, fiction writer, children’s writer, historian, biographer, and translator.

■ By the age of twenty she began a career both as an editor and as a children’s writer. Her first major work of her own authorship included Epistles on Women, Exemplifying Their Character and Condition in Various Ages and Nations: With Miscellaneous Poems, which talks of women to be in a more equal view with men.

■ The gothic novel she wrote was Lorimer.■ She had also reviewed the “Poems in two volumes, by William Wordsworth, Author

of the Lyrical Ballads” for the Annual Review.

■ It is noted that the Romantic Era “women critics frequently praise other women writers, but they sometimes capitalize on the occasion of reviewing one female writer to promote other women writers” (Waters 15).

■ The Romantic Era has also several other careers too which were did by the eighteenth-century women writers. Norma Clarke however says that most of the women writers came from the genteel classes, for they had access to education. Most of the women critics on the other hand came from an aristocratic statuses. Yet, still some of these women were less successful than men.

■ The Romantic Era was also a period which brought in many changes including that of the rapid spread of ownership of clocks with minute hands throughout the late nineteenth-century. This period made lawyers to condemn their old sundials as childish. This is proved by the “evidence of the new pressurized awareness of the value of time” (Aaron 56),

■ This was also a period in which men writers flourished. Joseph Johnson, a radical and is one of those persons who is to be remembered, for he had helped to make many of these texts to be surviving today, he was the editor of the Analytical Review, which published the works of Wollstonecraft, Lucy Aikin, and Anna Letitia Barbauld. Thomas Longman III of the Annual Review and the journal Athenæum published the works of Maria Jane Jewsbury, and many more journals such as these gave fame to many women writers of the Romantic Era. Yet there are still many female writers who never had their fame glow as their male counterparts had. As Terry Castle, an American literary scholar has found many women writers of the Romantic Era, so has Adriana Craciun of the University of California, has created a page in the web for these Romantic Era Women Writers (http://craciun.ucr.edu/women-romantic-era-writers/) where details of various women romantic writers can be gathered.

■ Thus it is always advisable to see history from both sides of a coin.