ABSTRACT
This chapter aims to take Elizabeth Barrett Browning at her word and accept that she really believed that she had no poetic grandmothers, then her poetry would be the logical place to end this account of female poetic tradition. Barrett Browning's poetry would be a perfect example of Bloomian 'clinamen', a swerve away from the tradition that attempts, in the process, to erase it. Indeed, certain characteristics of Plath's poetry come into sharper focus once examined through the lens of this female poetic tradition. The complexity of women's poetry and the various historical, social and personal circumstances which enabled it to flourish in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries has been eclipsed by the seductive figure of the suffering woman. Charlotte Smith recognised the power of this figure, she could never have imagined the consequences it was to have for female poetic tradition.
