She came from a presumably white family with mixed English, Scottish, and French background on her mother's side, which also had strong literary connections. There is dispute among critics as to how far she was...
Friends, Associates
Rosamund Marriott Watson
According to Angela Leighton
, the social scandal that erupted in the wake of RMW
's adultery and second divorce not only created a rift in private between the writer and many of her friends...
Intertextuality and Influence
Felicia Hemans
Wordsworth
in 1837 revised his existing Extempore Effusion upon the Death of James Hogg to include a stanza describing FH
as that holy Spirit / Sweet as the spring, as ocean deep.
Wordsworth, William. The Complete Poetical Works of Wordsworth. Editor George, Andrew J., Houghton Mifflin, 1932.
737
Although his...
Literary responses
Elizabeth Barrett Browning
The first monograph feminist studies of EBB
were by Helen Cooper
, 1988, and Angela Leighton
,1989. Other significant studies have appeared by Deirdre David
(in Intellectual Women and Victorian Patriarchy, 1987), Glennis Stephenson (later Byron)
Literary responses
Harriet Hamilton King
Hickey
noted of these poems that we have the delight in beauty, in beauty for its own sake; the revelling in the wonder of flowers, which Mrs. King can write of as very few can...
Literary responses
L. E. L.
Feminist critics have been more apt to see LEL as responding in a range of ways to the wrongs of her sex, if only to the extent that, in Angela Leighton
's analysis, these form...
Literary responses
Constance Naden
William R. Hughes
provided for the Midland Naturalist a review of this book which CN
called kind.
Hughes, William Richard et al. Constance Naden: A Memoir. Bickers and Son, 1890.
38-9
. The Woman's World (edited by Oscar Wilde
) gave the book one of its several...
Literary responses
Augusta Webster
Since the 1990s, AW
's critical star has been rising rapidly. She is now regularly included in Victorian poetry anthologies and has had substantial critical articles and book chapters devoted to her by scholars including...
Literary responses
Henrietta Euphemia Tindal
After languishing for more than a century, HET
's work has reappeared in the anthology of Victorian women poets edited by Angela Leighton
and Margaret Reynolds
.Leighton compares her unsentimenal poems on childbirth and motherhood...
Literary responses
Bessie Rayner Parkes
Parkes acknowledged that she considered poetry not as an intellectual luxury but a very real national influence.
Gleadle, Kathryn. The Early Feminists. Macmillan, 1995.
182
Perhaps taking that as a hint, anthologists Angela Leighton
and Margaret Reynolds
note that BRP
's poetry...
Literary responses
Bessie Rayner Parkes
Leighton
and Reynolds
suggest that this poem, together with Barrett Browning
's Aurora Leigh, is one of the few bold attempts to tackle the woman question in verse and it is clearly influenced by...
Reception
Michael Field
As Katharine had feared, once MF
's true identity became known, their work received less attention, and critical enthusiasm waned.
Blain, Virginia, editor. Victorian Women Poets: A New Annotated Anthology. Longman, 2001.
208
Angela Leighton
argues that Field's insistence on publishing largely unperformable verse tragedies
Leighton, Angela. Victorian Women Poets: Writing Against the Heart. University Press of Virginia, 1992.
203
probably...
Reception
Constance Naden
Recently her writing has been included in Victorian Women Poets: an Anthology, edited by Margaret Reynolds
and Angela Leighton
, 1995; in Nineteenth-Century Women Poets: An Oxford Anthology, edited by Isobel Armstrong
,...
Reception
Felicia Hemans
FH
was slow to register on the radar of recuperative feminist critics. Cora Kaplan
was an early exception in her anthology Salt and Bitter and Good, 1975.Margaret Homans
in her early attempt to...
Textual Features
Mary Elizabeth Coleridge
MEC
's poems have been likened, for their mysterious tone, to those of William Blake
. Among the eerie poems included in Fancy's Following is The Witch. Here the speaker, Geraldine (a sorceress), is...
Timeline
No timeline events available.
Texts
Leighton, Angela. “’Because Men Made the Laws’: the Fallen Woman and the Woman Poet”. New Feminist Discourses, edited by Isobel Armstrong, Routledge, 1992, pp. 342-60.
Leighton, Angela. Elizabeth Barrett Browning. Indiana University Press, 1986.
Leighton, Angela. “The Poetry”. The Cambridge Companion to the Brontës, edited by Heather Glen, Cambridge University Press, 2002, pp. 53-71.
Leighton, Angela, and Margaret Reynolds, editors. Victorian Women Poets: An Anthology. Blackwell, 1995.
Leighton, Angela. Victorian Women Poets: Writing Against the Heart. University Press of Virginia, 1992.