Poetess Futures: Unsettling Victorian Poetry at Scale

Poetess Futures:Unsettling Victorian Poetry at Scale Alison Chapman (bio) Given the massive quantity of poems that Victorians read in serial print, the range of poets conventionally associated with the poetess seems extremely limited. This article considers scaling out the poetess in Digital [End Page 190] Victorian Periodical Poetry (DVPP), which currently includes 15,525 poems and 3,482 poets from 21 Victorian periodicals (Chapman 2022). Although "poetess" was often synonymous with woman poet for the Victorians, as Susan Brown argues, it was an unstable term. And Victorian associations between woman poet and the poetess, and between women's poetry and poetess poems, were fraught for women writers (Brown 180–82). How might we detect a generous range of poetess poets in a digital corpus? Can scaling out the poetess redefine that historical and critical category? DVPP includes many unfamiliar women poets publishing in two literary annuals intimately associated with poetess poetry, Forget-Me-Not (1822–47) and The Keepsake (1827–57), such as Florence Margaret Wilson (Chapman, "Wilson, Florence Margaret"). Wilson was connected with metropolitan literary society but lived a precarious life as a governess in St. Petersburg (once shipwrecked on a journey home to London), the owner of a stationery shop in Victoria, British Columbia (just a few miles from where I write), and then of a saloon in the British Columbian Cariboo. As a poetess poet, her credentials seem excellent: five poems in The Keepsake on sentimental subjects, as well as two poetry volumes (Lyrics for Leisure Hours [1842], Boudoir Lyrics [1844]). Wilson's "Dreams," from the 1850 Keepsake, shares features familiar from poetess poetry: sentimental subject matter, formulaic stanzas, lyrical melodiousness, effusion. Her socio-economic precarity—a common poetess attribute—lies uncomfortably alongside her poetry. The extent of poetess poetry clearly remains to be fully charted. DVPP contains 3,576 periodical poems authored by 718 female poets.1 There are many more women poets not yet identified (and unidentifiable) whose authorship is disguised behind unsigned and pseudonymous poems. But of the women periodical poets we do know about, the extent of their poetry allows for quantitative searching. How can we find other poetesses like Wilson? There are two ways to expand the search through DVPP. First, searching the index for poems by women in periodicals known to be major print venues for poetess poetry, especially The Keepsake and the Forget-Me-Not. DVPP identifies 105 women poets in these annuals, publishing 498 poems overall.2 The majority of these women annual poets are unfamiliar. Does publishing poetry in a literary annual with a female signature automatically affiliate poems and poet with the poetess? DVPP person records provide biographical metadata that give further granularity, such as nationality, and indicate the wide range of periodical titles in which these women published (in addition to the annuals), suggesting that scaling up the poetess brings historical nuance. But such discoveries rely upon a major conventional definition of poetess poetry—poems by women in literary annuals—which is problematic because of the quantity of poems without authorship attribution. In Forget-Me-Not and Keepsake alone there are 257 pseudonymous poems and 155 unsigned poems, not all identified or identifiable by author.3 Poetess discovery that relies on gender is inherently limited—ironically, given [End Page 191] the hyperfeminine basis of the poetess. This fact reveals a major fissure in the poetess at scale as a hyperfeminized category and also questions how Victorian readers identified the poetess in mass serial print when so many poets disguised their authorship. Did Victorian readers associate specific poetic features with the poetess, allowing them to categorize poetry without a female authorship attribution? Or was poetess poetry as a category more recognizable when signed with a female name? A satirical 1833 Keepsake poem by Marguerite Gardiner (Countess of Blessington), "Stock in Trade of Modern Poetesses," suggests both associations were at play, although her emphasis is more on trite poetic devices than on female authorship. Gardiner's extensive listing of stock tropes also discloses how poetess poets were acutely self-reflexive and sophisticated about poetess conventions; indeed, as an editor of The Keepsake, Gardiner herself is both a sharp critic as well as a major distributor of...

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