Blog 3
Female Victorian Poetry
With the exception of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Christina Rosetti, and the Bront sisters, male poets have continuously represented Victorian poetry, even in contemporary literary criticism. But many people thought it was silly of these women's contemporaries to devote so much time to producing poetry. Poetry was viewed as a male-dominated field and a great, high art form unsuitable for female involvement. Despite attempts at exclusion, women persisted in writing and found support in one another. Women conquered their literary challenges by dedicating poetry to one another and responding to one another's poems, drawing power from the conversation between themselves. They were promoting a conversation that was overwhelmingly female.
They were promoting a conversation that was overwhelmingly female. The poems Christina Rosetti and Elizabeth Barrett Browning exchanged are the ones that best demonstrate this. In response to Browning's poem "L.E.L.'s Last Question," Rossetti composes her own poem "L.E.L." This dialogue, according to Isobel Armstrong and Virginia Blain (1999), demonstrates a "peculiar feminine subjectivity, sociality, and homosocial bonding" (p. xi), which helped to defend their writing projects against harsh criticism.
It was challenging for Victorian women to write political poetry. Women had to make sure their work matched expectations of what was acceptable for a woman and a home in order to avoid criticism.
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