If New Woman writing embraced everything from political reform, sexual freedoms, and economic and social independence to literary publishing, Lucy Bland and other historians have confirmed that New Woman debates often played out in terms of marriage, whether in Mona Caird's path-breaking 1888 essay on “Marriage” or her by-now familiar novel of 1894, The Daughters of Danaus. This title, taken from the myth of women in Hades condemned to haul water in leaky jars after murdering their husbands on their wedding nights, suggests both the futility of life for middle-class Victorian women and the latent, murderous recoil they could harbor. To fall back upon these two Caird works to exemplify New Woman writing, however, is in some ways to perpetuate a generic oversimplification that New Woman writing was a prose medium.¹

New Woman poets who address the marriage question might be called daughters of Daphne rather than Danaus – but not the familiar Daphne hounded by Apollo, god of poetry, until she was transformed into an inert laurel tree, alive but confined. In contrast to this silenced figure, the Greek historian Diodorus Siculus (a contemporary of Julius Caesar) recorded a far more intriguing historical Daphne. Oddly enough, given the antagonistic relationship between chivalric values and New Woman politics, this Daphne was circulated among nineteenth-century readers by chivalric writer Kenelm Digby in his Broad Stone of Honour, a tome republished as late as 1877 by Bernard Quaritch, himself a notable fin-de-siècle figure. Quoting Diodorus as his source, Digby remarks, “even Homer is said to have stolen many verses from Daphne, the Sibyl priestess of Apollo, in the temple of Delphi, and to have enriched his own poems with them” (29). In terming New Woman poets fin-de-siècle daughters of Daphne, I conceive of them as initiates rather than silenced victims of poetic tradition, who functioned as original, even originary voices, yet whose work remains an insufficiently acknowledged source.

In Marriage Questions in Modern Fiction of 1897, the antifeminist Elizabeth Rachel Chapman singled out Olive Schreiner's 1883 Story of an African Farm as a key text in “Marriage Rejection and Marriage Reform” (the title of one of her chapters), but Chapman did refer to a poem as well. Overlooking any contribution to the marriage debate by women poets, Chapman instead cited Faust – Prince Lucifer, by Alfred Austin, the conservative poet laureate whom no one then or now would ever mistake for a New Woman writer (98–107). Women poets were better served by Elaine Showalter in A Literature of Their Own, which famously identified Schreiner's Lyndall as “the first wholly feminist heroine in the English novel” (199). Showalter's argument was prefaced by a chapter epigraph taken from “The New Woman,” a poem published in the January 1894 issue of Shafts by D. B. M. (and reprinted in full by Juliet Gardiner in her 1993 anthology of New Woman writing [Showalter 199, 182; Gardiner 14–15]). Showalter's chapter on “Feminist Fiction” also glanced in passing at Mathilde Blind's intriguing epic, The Ascent of Man, Ellis Ethelmer's Woman Free (a narrative poem published in 1893 by the Women's Emancipation Union), and Mary Coleridge's “The White Women.” But in keeping with critical canons of the late 1970s, Showalter dismissed the efficacy of Coleridge and other New Woman writers: “The feminist writers were engaged in the kind of quarrel that, according to Yeats, leads to rhetoric but not poetry. Thus the writers of this period…have not fared well with posterity” (186, 191–94). Certainly the poems by D. B. M. and Ethelmer bear out Yeats's (and Showalter's) charge, as these excerpts will, I think, demonstrate:

Despite adopting, or perhaps because D. B. M. adopted, the meter of Tennyson's “Locksley Hall” her poem seems altogether too hortatory, while Ethelmer's fusion of Neoclassical couplets and the Spenserian stanza's concluding alexandrine undercuts her radical argument by adopting overly stodgy poetic convention.

The surprise is that neither Chapman nor Showalter thought to cite a genuinely interesting, well-crafted poem that explored the same issues of thwarted companionship and “brainless bondage” just seen in the Ethelmer stanza quoted above: Amy Levy's “Xantippe.” “Xantippe” is all the more notable because its artful, nuanced depiction of women's enforced ignorance, its awareness that the stereotypic shrew, like woman, is not born but made, preceded the publication date of Schreiner's The Story of an African Farm by two years. It is even conceivable that Schreiner, who arrived in England in 1881, read Levy's 1881 Xantippe and Other Verse while engaged in a final revision of her manuscript before submitting her novel to a publisher in 1882 (First and Scott 84, 115–16; Beckman 55). As Linda Hunt Beckman observes, Levy seems to have met Schreiner around 1882 as a result of the time both women spent in the British Museum Reading Room and the radical circles both women frequented (Beckman 79). But it is unnecessary in any case to “prove” that Levy's poem influenced Schreiner. In historical terms Xantippe's monologue functions relative to Lyndall's as did Daphne's poetry relative to Homer's: as a key precursor text that has been insufficiently included in histories of New Woman writing.

Significantly, poets were at times recognized as New Woman writers in their own era. In reviewing The Feminine Note in Fiction by William Leonard Courtney, the influential editor Clement Shorter (married to New Woman Irish poet Dora Sigerson Shorter) asserted to the huge readership of the Daily Mail that

He instanced “Knight Errant,” by Louise Imogen Guiney, the Irish American poet,² to illustrate his point: Although Shorter might have interpreted “The Knight Errant (Donatello's Saint George)” as a poem uttered by the male figure in Donatello's sculpture, he saw in Guiney's poem a woman's appropriation of the warrior's spirit as she undertook her own battles, an approach underwritten by the contrast between the speaker's opening, overdetermined plight – one born to be “meek of mind” – and her contrasting desire for “A short life in the saddle, Lord!/Not long life by the fire.” Though today's readers are likely to be more interested in the poem's gender masquerade that calls chivalry into question than in its rhyme and form, Guiney's technical command of the aesthetic form she selected is unquestionable. Clement Shorter underscored the point when he contrasted the Shorter's dismissal of an older generation of women poets resulted more from fin-de-siècle suspicion of Victorian forebears whom younger writers sought to displace than from complex consideration of Hemans or Landon. What is important here is that Shorter expressed respect for the work of New Woman poets as poetry while also recognizing its function as political intervention and critique.

A less expected expression of similar views appeared five years earlier in the venerable, unmistakably conservative Quarterly Review in a survey of British women poets prompted by the publication of Barrett Browning's letters and Mackenzie Bell's biography of Christina Rossetti. Although the reviewer sought to contain the radical implications of New Woman writing, the review singled out E. Nesbit, best known today as a children's writer but an author whose first allegiance was to poetry (Briggs 36); her debut volume, Lays and Legends, was so well received that it went into a second edition. Since she was also a prominent member of the Fabian Society, her radical credentials were quite clear. The Quarterly Review identified E. Nesbit's best lyrics as a form of New Woman writing in which

There sounds the characteristic note, of longing after freedom, of escape, not necessarily from unhappy wifehood or from the limitations of convention or custom, but from the voluntary bondage of the woman's nature; for look at the end of this poem, ‘The Woman's World’: It is a delicious irony of history that in describing Nesbit's verse the conservative Quarterly Review of January 1899 articulated a major theme of Betty Friedan's Feminine Mystique in the 1960s – the nameless sense among married middle-class women of something missing in life. In quoting so generously from Nesbit's poem the journal thus circulated an incisive critique of women's relative identity within Victorian marriage and of women's complicity in their own subjection. At the same time, however, the review suppressed lines from Nesbit that tied the poem unmistakably to marriage: Also missing were Nesbit's lines addressing the “brainless bondage” against which “Xantippe” had earlier protested: Nesbit's poem appeared anonymously under the title “Woman Free” in Shafts in March 1893,⁴ a date subsequent to the private printing of Sarah Grand's Heavenly Twins (1892) but well in advance of the public release of Grand's novel in August 1893 (Nelson, “Sarah” 128). Yet again a kind of daughter of Daphne, Nesbit anticipated in a less-widely-read poem key ideas that would soon be associated with Grand's best-selling novel.

Nesbit also anticipated Sarah Grand in 1886, in a poem included in Lays and Legends. Nesbit's frequently anthologized song celebrating the delights of a newborn baby to its mother –

was in fact part of a long narrative poem entitled “The Moat House.” Despite the decorous maternal joy expressed in this interpolated lyric, the larger poem is a thoroughgoing critique of marriage that also models solidarity among women. In it a novice freely abandons her nunnery and repudiates marriage to become the lover of a young lord: “‘No priest,’ she cried in doubt and fear,/‘He would divide, not join us, dear./I am mine – I give myself to thee’” (20). But the community balks at the irregular arrangement and insists on conventional union with a proper – in other words virginal – bride. Lady May, the local duke's daughter, is prevailed upon by arguments about the salutary effect her “purity” would have in reforming the errant nobleman, and agrees to marry him. As the newly-wed couple's carriage returns from the church, his abandoned lover commits suicide by throwing herself under the carriage wheels. Recognizing the former nun's despair and her own new husband's easy faithlessness to a past lover and their baby, Lady May defends the dead woman, takes her baby to raise for her own, and leaves her husband without ever consummating the marriage, rather as Evadne Frayling refuses to consummate her marriage in Sarah Grand's The Heavenly Twins.

As I hope is clear by now, not only from the above examples but also from scholarship by Marion Thain, Ana I. Parejo Vadillo, James Diedrick, and others, a number of poets were unquestionably New Woman writers, daughters of Daphne who helped initiate, develop, and sustain fin-de-siècle marriage debates. Why, then, has New Woman scholarship so frequently ignored them? Answering this question entails another look both at women's poetic practices and at our own as scholars. One factor in the relative invisibility of poets among recognized New Woman writers was the women's own desire to be recognized as poets, not as mere versifiers or propagandists. This was all the more important because poetry sold less widely than novels; since a poet could not count on making very much if any money from her books (in contrast to income from the periodical market), succès d'estime was all the more important. Avant garde as well as traditional aesthetics at the century's end valued poems marked by command of formal elements such as rhyme, sonority, and deft rhythmic effects. Demonstrable range of technique, voice, and subject matter also remained crucial to poetic reputation and standing. Even at mid-century Aurora Leigh was careful to document her passage (and ascent) through a range of forms, from the ballad to descriptive poems to the pastoral in Book 5 of Barrett Browning's eponymous epic. Fin-de-siècle poets, we can assume, were likewise anxious to include a variety of tones in their volumes.

Austin Dobson's letter of 15 November 1906 to a correspondent seeking publishing advice registers his own self-consciousness about such matters: “what comes out with success in a periodical does not always succeed in a book, which has a more permanent purpose. There must be variety; there must also be, in each piece, something more than a getting over the ground, a progress to a point, or the piece will not be re-read.”⁶

To indicate their own claims to the title of poet, women were unlikely to amass together poems that were inflected by political purpose or overt protest unless political protest was their intent, as in Louisa Bevington's 1895 collection of anarchist poems entitled Liberty Lyrics.⁷ Other considerations about reviewers also determined volumes' arrangement. Thus Graham R. Tomson removed “The Quern of the Giants,” a feminist-socialist poem, from her 1889 volume on the advice of Andrew Lang. Inspired by the Icelandic Prose Edda, the poem adopts the meter of Swinburne's “Song in Time of Revolution, 1860” to narrate the tale of King Frodi, to whom a brother king gives the giant Quern stone and two giant women slaves, Frenia and Menia, who will grind prosperity and peace. Seduced by greed, Frodi turns tyrant until the women slaves revolt and grind out bloody violence rather than peace. As Lang cautioned Tomson, however, “There is just one objection to Frodi – William Morris. I don't mean that it is an imitation, but it is so easy for reviewers to say so. I would not put any long stories in your book. I'd begin with the Bird-B[ride,] The Scotch Ballad [‘Deid Folks' Ferry’], and any other short narratives. Then I'd have the sonnets – and finish up with such of the Frenchified forms as you think worth keeping” (qtd. in Hughes, Graham R. 74–75). Tomson followed Lang's advice, which meant excluding “Quern of the Giants” and effacing the New Woman politics informing the volume's title poem, “Ballad of the Bird-Bride,” which adopted folklore to express what Nesbit's “Woman Free” had: the entrapment of a wild spirit in bonds of marriage. Instead, “Ballad of the Bird-Bride” was clustered among poems of the supernatural rather than related feminist works. Lang's warning against long poems may also explain Tomson's suppression of “Marpessa,” an accomplished blank verse classical narrative likewise skeptical of marriage (Hughes, “Fair” 111–14), when Tomson selected poems for her 1891 volume, A Summer Night.

New Woman poems in fact tended to be carefully dispersed within their respective volumes, which is one reason that, according to the 1899 Quarterly Review, even among Nesbit's poems a distinct New Woman “note is rarely so clear…, and there are many of the lyrics in which it does not sound at all” (53). How often such dispersals resulted from editorial attempts to veil dissent and attract consumers, or from women's desire to enhance their claims to aesthetic authority, is impossible to establish in retrospect. Still, it is important to recognize the complex, multivalent politics of their published volumes. As Hugo Achugar observes,

Taking Nesbit as an example once again, we can see how her placement of New Woman poems among other kinds of works mitigated the effect of radicalism by absorbing political poems into an alternative wholeness of purpose. “The Moat House” is the second poem in Nesbit's 1886 Lays and Legends; the first is “Tekel,” a narrative in which a Roman intent on a life of religious meditation and penance retreats from the city only to be undone by a woman's eyes glimpsed on a wall painting in a ruined city. After “The Moat House” comes “Unofficial,” a brief monologue in which a successful capitalist ruefully looks back at the missed chance for love he might have enjoyed with Kitty in his youth. “Unofficial” gives way to “Pessimism,” a lyric on the inherent futility of life and humanity's reserves of hope despite what they know. Taken in sequence these poems look rather like a series of three on the subject of thwarted love that culminate in a philosophical (if highly lyric) meditation on the human condition:

The sequence forms a very effective demonstration of Nesbit's range but also has the effect of containing the feminist resonances of “The Moat House,” linking this poem to other love problems as much as, if not more than, New Woman issues.

Nesbit's 1895 A Pomander of Verse, arranged in sections named after aromatics, included a poem that, I argue in New Woman Poets: An Anthology (6), can also be read in relation to Sarah Grand's Heavenly Twins, especially Grand's critique of the sexual double standard and threat posed by male promiscuity to women's mental and emotional health. “Quieta ne Movete” presents a married couple in bed and reveals through the husband's interior monologue the number of past sexual encounters he brings to the marriage couch:

“Quieta Ne Movete” is in the “Rosemary” section of poems presumably devoted to remembrance, which opens with a cynical set of lyrics called “A Song of Partings.” In this title a suitor declares to five successive women that he will never forget them, then says “good-bye.” This ironic treatment of modern erotic relations is succeeded by two lyrics, “The Ghost” and “The Way of the Wood,” that express wistful yearning for lost loves. The faithless husband of “Quieta ne Movete” punctuates these laments of sorrowing lovers but this poem is itself followed by another lyric of lost love, “Envoys”: The tone here is wistful, the imagery lovely and fleeting, a neat and incisive turn after the appalling glimpse of evil faces hovering around the pillow a man shares with his unknowing wife in “Quieta ne Movete.” The “Rosemary” section ends with three more poems that express the pain of being forgotten by a lover or invoke the experience of memory. If the sequence is a fine display of Nesbit's range of voice, it also acts to decenter the New Woman politics that surface in “A Song of Partings” and “Quieta ne Movete” in favor of a larger consideration of faithlessness and forgetting in love – though the New Woman lyrics in turn disrupt such timeless themes with historically specific resonances. As Achugar remarks, “The coherence of a book of poems is often not absolute, and the heterogeneity of projects supporting a particular performance is related to the presence of implicit projects that may be in conflict with both the explicit project and the textual formalization” (654).

The “heterogeneity of projects” in Nesbit's 1886 and 1895 volumes, and in Graham R. Tomson's 1889 volume, might be seen in relation to Swinburne, who aimed at aesthetic power and political intervention, and also to female aestheticism as defined by Talia Schaffer in The Forgotten Female Aesthetes. Schaffer argues that many late-Victorian women writers of all genres embraced aestheticism because it provided maneuverability for the woman writer, enabling her to explore a variety of subject (and political) positions under cover of pursuing beauty as an end in itself. Generic specificity may, however, require a partial revision of Schaffer's argument. More readily than an essay or novel, a book of poems could crack open aesthetic “wholeness” (and containment) and point toward the fissures of heterogeneity identified by Achugar. That is, individual poems could be detached, reread, and memorized as completed works unto themselves (as with their prior publication in periodicals), so that New Woman poems could always potentially escape the confining bounds of a book or drop the cover of aestheticism to emerge anew as politicized poems that existed in meaningful relationship to other New Woman writing.

Yet generic specificity is probably one more reason that discussion of poems has, until the last decade, played so scant a role in New Woman scholarship. Celeste M. Schenck suggests that we tend to neglect poetry radical in content but traditional in form as a result of tastes shaped by modernist norms of complexity or defamiliarization (see also Dowson 1–12). Schenck's point is borne out by Elaine Showalter's dismissal on literary grounds of the New Woman poems she was so unusual in having read when she published A Literature of Their Own. And though Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar helped found feminist approaches to poetry in Madwoman in the Attic and No Man's Land, their Norton Anthology of Literature by Women includes almost no New Woman poems from the 1880s and 90s, which were more overtly feminist in content than many Emily Dickinson poems but less innovative in form or diction. The divergent techniques, audiences, and receptions of fiction, prose, and poetry (which often result in their separate study) also militate against a fuller representation of poets in New Woman scholarship. And within poetry studies, prior to recent decades' interest in cultural studies or to Isobel Armstrong's monumental study of Victorian poetry and its politics, form usually trumped politics or their interplay. Perhaps the first thing we know about “Xantippe” is that it is a dramatic monologue (see Scheinberg). But this might lead more readily to Levy's relation to the Brownings rather than, say, to Olive Schreiner. I want to close by illustrating this point with a lesser-known poem, “A Marriage Charm” by Nora Hopper, an Anglo-Irish poet championed by W. B. Yeats in the 1890s but little regarded today (see Brownson). In “A Marriage Charm” a prospective bridegroom says a charm over the woman he woos:

Hopper's shrewd appropriations of poetic tradition in “A Marriage Charm” foreground its politics while providing part of the poem's own “charm.” On one hand her poem recalls classical idyll, particularly Theocritus's “The Spell,” in which a woman casts a spell to bring back a lover who has deserted her and vows murder if the charm fails. In contrast to irrational female violence in “The Spell,” Hopper foregrounds male tyranny that compensates for masculine weakness. Like “Porphyria's Lover,” her poem is also an ironic dramatic monologue that exposes an expression of love as a will to power. In the 1890s Hopper was usually read as a Celtic Revival poet, especially after Yeats termed her 1894 Ballads in Prose one of the best volumes of the decade and the best Irish volume of the year. The poem's reference to “runes” marks the setting as northern rather than classical, and the charm might be read as an echo of ancient folk customs. But the “charm” is also a trope of marriage laws that deprived women of political and erotic agency yet were so naturalized by custom and ideology that their hold might well be construed as magic; and, as in Nesbit's “Woman Free” or Levy's “Xantippe,” entrapment in marriage is linked with “brain bondage,” with the fate, as the lover declares to his bride, “That you and Knowledge, love, may never meet.” Constraints on poetic careers and on academic study of separate genres help to explain why New Woman poets have functioned as “daughters of Daphne.” Given, however, the considerable body of New Woman poetry and the rich opportunities it affords to illuminate the New Woman literary movement and poetry's complex interplay between politics and aesthetics, it is necessary not only to acquaint ourselves with these poets but also to read their work alongside fiction like Daughters of Danaus.