“My soul was singing at a work apart”: Female Victorian poets achieving voice

For the last few decades, critics\u27 efforts have been concentrated on rediscovering female poets long excluded from the canon, and in the case of Victorian poets, studying each woman individually. This project attempts to synthesize these readings and biographies in order to consider the work of female Victorian poets in terms of the movements their work displays, balanced against the more familiar background of male Victorian poetics. I have chosen to explore four strategies by which female Victorian poets—including Augusta Webster, Michael Field, and Christina Rossetti—not only achieved their poetic voices, but depicted themselves doing so. Analyzing a few exemplary poems per chapter, I track the uses these poets made of their literary lineage, their function as sisters, their desire to avail themselves of the mask of the renegade, and their understanding of the silences death seems to demand. I have organized these trends so that the project moves from community to isolation, and it ends with a discussion of the complex work that stakes claim to various genres as it progresses and, moreover, unites all of these methods: Elizabeth Barrett Browning\u27s Aurora Leigh