ABSTRACT
The sonnet sequence provided female poets, as it did male ones, with an established yet flexible form through which to engage in sustained selfexploration. By the 1880s the female-authored sonnet sequence had an illustrious heritage of its own. The first sonnet sequence in English by a woman was Lady Mary Wroth's Pamphilia to Amphilanthus, published in 1621, a late contribution to the fashion for sonnet sequences begun by Wroth's uncle Sir Philip Sidney in Astrophil and Stella. Setting aside the abortive series of sonnets addressed by 'Benedict' to 'Melissa' in 1789, the love-sonnet sequence was not revived as a coherent form on a substantial scale until 1796 when another woman, Mary Robinson, published Sappho to Phaon. Robinson's sequence formed part of the revival of the sonnet itself, for which, according to the editors of a recent anthology of Romantic-era sonnets, women were 'largely responsible' (Feldman and Robinson, 1999, p.IO). It would be possible to draw up a tradition of female sonneteers within Romanticism to mirror the familiar male lineage which starts with William Lisle Bowles and leads through Wordsworth to Keats, Hartley Coleridge and Matthew Arnold. This tradition would begin with Charlotte Smith and Anna Seward and culminate in Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Sonnets from the Portuguese.
