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Women Writers of the Romantic Period: Rewriting the Masculine World

Joshua Gnana Raj P Dr B. J. Geetha

Ph D Research Scholar Asst Prof. of English
Periyar University, Salem 11 Periyar University, Salem 11
Email id: joshuaraj10@gmail.com Email id: geetprem05@gmail.com

ABSTRACT
The Romantic Period was an artistic, literary and intellectual movement, it is called such
since, the period brought in many changes which include the rapid spread of the ownership of
clocks with minute hands throughout the late nineteenth-century. This period made lawyers to
condemn old sundials as childish. It was also the time when culturally as well as socially, termed
as an age of transition from gothic writing characteristics of the second half of the eighteenth-
century with a particular appeal to a new generation of women readers, to a more patriarchal
aesthetics in which the popular styles of earlier ages were dismissed as unmanly.
This was the period in which men writers flourished. Yet there are many female writers
who never had their fame glow as their male counterparts. This paper will deal with the hidden
female writers of the Romantic era. This paper will also mainly focus on the rethinking of the
individual and the Romantic society at large.
Key Words: Romantic Era, History
References
Aaron, Jane. A Double Singleness. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991. Print.
Craciun, Adriana. “Women Romantic Era Writers.” Craciun. Craciun, n.d. Web. 17 July. 2016.
Waters, Mary A, ed. British Women Writers of the Romantic Period: An Anthology of their
Literary Criticism. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. Print.
Women Writers of the Romantic Period: Rewriting the Masculine World
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. During the era the sights of natural landscapes played a major role in the lines of many
poems by poets. Romantics especially William Wordsworth, was often called as a nature poet.
Along with him were other men writers such as Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Robert Southey,
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Thomas de Quincey, Walter Scott, and so on. While the second generation poets of this era
includes poets such as Lord Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and John Keats.
This period also had other poets such as 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, since “The decades bridging the eighteenth- and nineteenth-centuries
witnessed a period of social change in Britain which has been described as more drastically
revolutionary than any since the prehistoric agricultural communities saw the passing away”
(Aaron 20) since the Romantic era was the time when major social changes took place in
England. It was also the time when there was a depopulation of the countryside and the rapid
development of overcrowded industrial cities, which took place around 1750 and 1850. Now
Clare is considered to be one of the most important poet of the nineteenth-century. George
Crabbe is yet another poet during this period, Lord Byron is said to have admired Crabbe.
But off 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). And due to this, “Readers
now widely recognize that novels, poems, and private letters all furnish passages in which
women writers express views of aesthetic ideals, the value of certain literary forms” (Waters 1).
Thus the poets of the Romantic era did bring out a new emotional which was marked from the
first romantic manifesto in English literature by Wordsworth in his “preface” to the 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)
On further researching, a period can change one’s thinking. Like Wordsworth’s Lyrical
Ballads, it is said that Baillie’s Introductory Discourse develops a theory for the Closet Drama
genre, which is a play that is meant to be read rather than to be acted on stage. On the other hand
some of the other writers such as Mary Wollstonecraft published her essays anonymously, which
made readers to assume that the writer was a male, even the same was with Baillie too. For
Wollstonecraft, criticism provided her a financial stability in order to launch her literary career.
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Anna Letitia Barbauld, a poet, essayist, educator, author of children’s literature,

devotional writer, political pamphleteer, and a literary critic. Anna Letitia Barbauld on 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. She 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).
Elizabeth Inchbald, a popular actress, playwright, and novelist was also once 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. For this 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.
Inchbald 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).
Of Henry V she says,
Fiction, from the pen of genius, will often appear more like nature, than nature
will appear like herself. The admired speech invented by the author for King
Henry, in a beautiful battle, seems the exact effect of the place and circumstances
with which he was then surrounded, and to be, as his very mind stamped on the
dramatic page; and yet perhaps his majesty, in his meditations, had no such
thoughts as are here provided for him ... . (Waters 68)
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Of the relationship between Perdita and Florizel in The Winter’s Tale she says “The
conversation of Florizel and Perdita have more of the tenderness than the fervour of love; …
though it is properly adapted to steal upon the heart of an individual” (Waters 69). And finally of
The Tempest she says ““The Tempest” contains some of the author’s best poetry …” (Waters
72). Inchbald gives to the readers of William Shakespeare, most heart touching criticism and also
has shown positive and negative views on the works done by him on her work The British
Theatre where she has given her remarks on various dramas by Shakespeare such as A Comedy
of Errors, Romeo and Juliet, Merchant of Venice, Much Ado About Nothing, Measure for
Measure, The Winter’s Tale, King Lear, Macbeth, Julius Caesar, Coriolanus, Othello, and
Twelfth Night. She also has given remarks on John Dryden’s All For Love, and also on various
other women drama writers of her age too.
Lucy Aikin, was a writer who received home education. 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.
She later turned out to be a poet, fiction writer, children’s writer, historian, biographer, and
translator. 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.
Maria Jane Jewsbury has written 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 says of the writing style of Jane Austen’s as:
… the main characters, those that the reader feels sure are to love, marry, and
make mischief, are introduced in the first or second chapter; the work is all done
by half a dozen people; no people, scene, or sentence, is ever introduced needless
to the matter in hand-no catastrophes, or discoveries, or surprises of a grand
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nature are allowed-neither children nor fortunes are lost or found by accident-the
mind is never taken off the level surface of life-the reader breakfasts, dines, walks
and gossips, with the various worthies, till a process of transmutation takes place
in him, and he absolutely fancies himself one of the company. Yet the winding up
of the plots involves surprises; a few incidents are entangled at the beginning in
the most simple and natural manner, and till the close one never feels quite sure
how they are to be disentangled. Disentangled, however they are, and that in a
most satisfactory manner. The secret is, Miss Austen was a thorough mistress in
the knowledge of human character … . (Waters 171-172)
Thus this is the way in which Jewsbury sees the works of Jane Austen. She also says of
Austen’s posthumous story Persuasion too. 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).
While Barbauld and Inchbald got the fame they needed, many other women writer in the
Romantic Era didn’t enjoy such. But these were the times when women writers began to
contribute to these new periodicals more frequently by the ends of the eighteenth-century.
Women writers by now began to explore to other arenas such as arts. For certain women writers
such as Mary Lamb, sister of Charles Lamb this literary profession of the Romantic Era had
provided her with an income. 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), it is also noted that
Charles Lamb never wore one. Through the evidence of:
A friend observing the absence of the usual adjunct of a business man’s attire,
presented him with a new gold watch which he accepted and carried for one day
only. A colleague asked Lamb what had become of it. “Pawned,” was the reply.
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He had actually pawned the watch finding it as a useless encumbrance. (Aaron

56)
Romantic Era was a time when culturally as well as socially, it was an age of transition
from gothic writing characteristics of the second half of the eighteenth-century with a particular
appeal to a new generation of women readers, to a more patriarchal aesthetics in which the
popular styles of earlier eras were dismissed as unmanly. 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
1found 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.
Works Cited
Aaron, Jane. A Double Singleness. Oxford. Clarendon Press, 1991. Print.
Craciun, Adriana. “Women Romantic Era Writers.” Craciun. Craciun, n.d. Web. 17 July. 2016.
Waters, Mary A, ed. British Women Writers of the Romantic Period: An Anthology of their
Literary Criticism. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. Print.