"Will inevitably shape interpretation and mark out a canon...Feldman is...a disciplined, lucid, and meticulous
editor...Her comprehensive collection enables the reader to see what working-class poets such as Janet Little and
Christian Milne were writing, and to sample such sports as the Countess of Blessington's satire on sentiment...and
Catherine Maria Fanshawe's parody of Wordsworth's combination of pantheism and literalism."
--Isobel Armstrong, Times Literary Supplement
"A singular resource providing information found in no other reference work...This anthology of works by 62
British women poets writing between 1770 and 1840...makes it clear that Romantic poetry encompasses much more than
Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley, and Keats."
--Library Journal
"A wide-ranging selection of poems written by British women from all kinds of backgrounds and geographical
locations...Detailed, scholarly headnotes...provide a clearer, more inflected understanding of this outstandingly
prolific period in the history of women's writing."
--Lucy Newlyn, Review of English Studies
Publisher Web Site, March, 2005
During the Romantic period, women such as Joanna Baillie, Anna Letitia Barbauld, Felicia Hemans, Letitia Elizabeth
Landon, Mary Robinson, Anna Seward, Charlotte Smith, and Mary Tighe were among the most highly respected and widely
read practitioners of the art of poetry. In fact, Hemans was one of the bestselling authors of the nineteenth century,
and Baillie was the foremost playwright of her time.
In British Women Poets of the Romantic Era, Paula R. Feldman introduces modern readers to the range and diversity
of women's poetic expression, making available more texts by more women poets of the Romantic era than have ever
been collected in a single book in the twentieth century. Feldman provides detailed introductions for each of the
sixty-two poets, chronicling their lives, poetic careers, and critical reputations. This groundbreaking volume
not only documents the richness of their literary contributions but also changes our thinking about the poetry
of the English Romantic period.