Introduction

The relative uncanonicity of all the Victorian women poets has had an interesting effect on the critical writing about them, producing particularly sympathetic, protective and inclusive approaches. The rediscovery of more women poets, and especially the construction of a Romantic feminine poetic tradition around figures such as Felicia Hemans and Laetitia Landon has provided a literary 'home' for the Victorian women poets that was not available to earlier critics. The divisions into 'inner' and 'outer' readings cut across the different reading strategies. In literary studies, the 'herstorical' impetus has taken the form of challenges to the male-dominated canon of English Literature, and pressure for the inclusion of neglected women writers, and/or the establishment of a rival 'women's tradition' of writing. The 'rediscovery' by feminist critics in the late 1970s of Emily Brontë, Barrett Browning and Rossetti as Victorian women poets was part of this process, which is still going on.