ABSTRACT
Like Margaret Homans, the two authors are concerned with explaining the dearth of women poets. In their reading, nineteenth-century cultures, in the comments of masculinise critics, and in the internalised self-images of women poets, present poetry as an immodest and inappropriate activity for women. Some women, like Christina Rossetti, were however able to make poetry out of the very renunciation demanded of them – as for Homans, the poems are about the woman poet's silencing. Male muses also play a part here, enticing women into the dangerous and forbidden masculine realm of art and imagination. At the age of nineteen, Rossetti wrote a semi-autobiographical novella entitled Maude. Rossetti's Maude was an early attempt at exploring the landscape of destitution in which a ladylike fifteen-year-old poet ought to condemn herself to dwell. Her extraordinary Goblin Market, was written ten years later at height of her powers, and is a triumphant revision of Maude, an impassioned hymn of praise to necessity's virtue.
