ABSTRACT
This chapter draws upon an experience editing the complete poetry of Romantic-period poet Mary Robinson for Pickering & Chatto's eight-volume Works of Mary Robinson, published 2009-2010 under the general editorship of William Brewer. The sexism behind the neglect of women's poetry notwithstanding, it also happens to be true that much women's poetry from our period seems to be, well, not so great. For a time, scholars found citing contemporary reviews as a way to measure the esteem in which our writers were held by their contemporaries; however, a deeper understanding of the politics of reviewing reveals just how arbitrary and biased these assessments were - much like reviewing today. The problem with reading and thus with editing Romantic-period women's poetry is that doing so requires either a model of gender-genre difference. Editing the poetry of even particularly noteworthy women writers presents a different set of challenges not unlike those faced by editors of classical texts for which no originals exist.
