This is the first book to cover the whole range of epistolary verse in the period, including the discursive type favoured by Pope and the familiar and dramatic epistles. It advances a new model for defining the form, demonstrates the form's importance in the period, and pays attention to non-canonical epistles by women and labouring-class writers.
Henry James wrote of Lucy Aikin: “Clever, sagacious, shrewd ... and an accomplished writer, one wonders why her vigorous intellectual temperament has not attracted independent notice.” The most important long poem by a woman from the British Romantic era, Aikin’s Epistles on Women (1810) is the first text in English to re-write the entire history of western culture, from the creation story of Genesis through the eighteenth century, from a feminist perspective. Responding to Alexander Pope’s misogynistic “Epistle to a Lady,” Aikin argues that men’s degradation of women has hindered the growth of civilization, and provides historical and literary evidence for her claim that “man cannot degrade woman without degrading himself.” In addition to Epistles on Women, this Broadview Edition also includes a wide selection of poetry, historical writing, fiction, memoir, and literary criticism by Aikin, as well as letters, contemporary reviews, and other feminist historiographies.
Like Wordsworth, Hunt divided his output into loose generic categories when he began preparing a select edition of his poetry toward the end of his life, categories retained and amplified by H. S. Milford in his 1923 edition. Edgecombe has used these divisions as a way of organizing his study, and also of illustrating the immense range of forms and genres that the poet explored in the course of a long career.
Felicia Hemans was the most widely read woman poet in the nineteenth-century English-speaking world. Broadview’s edition shows why she was one of the few standard poets to be found in middle-class homes on both sides of the Atlantic, despite being routinely disparaged as a “merely” feminine poet. Included here is poetry representative of her entire career, from often-anthologized works, such as “The Homes of England” and “Casabianca,” to several long poems in their entirety, such as “The Forest Sanctuary.” Also included are selections of her prose and letters, a comprehensive introduction, and selections of views and reviews showing her changing and controversial place in culture into the twentieth century. All selections are edited, annotated, and introduced.
