ABSTRACT
Victorian poetry has been held until recently to have been largely a male preserve, with exceptions being made, on occasion, for Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Christina Rossetti and possibly Emily Brontë. This view has been consistently reflected in texts set for study in university courses, where Victorian poetry has been most often represented by the Big Four: Tennyson, Browning, Arnold and Hopkins, plus one or two of Hardy, Swinburne and the Pre-Raphaelites. Over the last five or ten years, however, increasing numbers of women poets have been rediscovered, 1 and it is now being recognised that Victorian readers and critics paid much more attention to the work of these women than was previously thought. Here is an immensely rich new field of study to be explored by today’s reader, much of which has not been available in print since it was first published in the nineteenth century. The problem which faces the modern anthologist, therefore, is not one of exclusion so much as of inclusion. We now know that there are so many remarkable women poets of the Victorian era, each of whom is well worthy of study on her own, that the necessary process of selection becomes increasingly difficult.
