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Poetry of
the New Woman
Public Concerns, Private Matters
Patricia Murphy
Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing
and Culture
Series Editor
Joseph Bristow
Department of English
University of California, Los Angeles
Los Angeles, CA, USA
Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture is a mono-
graph series that aims to represent innovative and interdisciplinary research
on literary and cultural works that were produced from the time of the
Napoleonic Wars to the fin de siècle. Attentive to the historical continu-
ities between ‘Romantic’ and ‘Victorian’, the series features studies that
assist in reassessing the meaning of these terms during a century marked
by diverse cultural, literary, and political movements. The aim of the series
is to look at the increasing influence of different types of historicism on
our understanding of literary forms and genres. It reflects a broad shift
from critical theory to cultural history that has affected not only the
1800-1900 period but also every field within the discipline of English lit-
erature. All titles in the series seek to offer fresh critical perspectives and
challenging readings of both canonical and non-canonical writings of
this era.
Patricia Murphy
Poetry of the New

Woman
Public Concerns, Private Matters
Patricia Murphy
English (emeritus)
Missouri Southern State University
Joplin, MO, USA
ISSN 2634-6494 ISSN 2634-6508 (electronic)

Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture
ISBN 978-3-031-19764-2 ISBN 978-3-031-19765-9 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-19765-9
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer
Nature Switzerland AG 2023
This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the
Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of
translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on
microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval,
electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now
known or hereafter developed.
The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this
publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are
exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use.
The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information
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Acknowledgments
As always, I greatly appreciate the encouragement and interest my brother,

Jim Murphy, and my sister, Sue Roche, have given me over the years for
my scholarly endeavors. I also wish to thank K. Schoenbrod for such sup-
port and for the advice given long ago to change careers and enter grad
school at the University of Iowa to study literature, which has fascinated
me since early adolescence.
I am grateful as well to Florence Boos for teaching me so much about
Victorian poetry during grad school. I also much appreciate her interest in
my scholarship on Victorian women poets.
In addition, I wish to thank two journals for allowing me to publish
modified material from articles that appeared there. Victorian Poetry fea-
tured my essay on E. Nesbit’s verses about marriage, and Victorians: A
Journal of Culture and Literature published my essay on Mathilde Blind’s
poems about “fallen women.”
v
Contents
1 Introduction: Many Voices, Many Issues 1
2 The Vagaries of Marriage 37
3 The Workings of Desire 71
4 Social Responsibility for the Destitute109
5 Grim Stories of the ‘Fallen Woman’147
6 Poets on Poetry179
7 The Promise of London217
8 Conclusion: Speculating on the Future251
Works Cited257
Index271
vii
CHAPTER 1
Introduction: Many Voices, Many Issues
Immersed in a tumultuous culture at the fin de siècle, New Woman poets

advanced significant, opportune, and compelling perspectives in address-
ing public matters and articulating personal concerns, with the boundary
between them often blurred.1 In so doing, these writers contested the
intellectual and behavioral constraints that plagued Victorian women,
exposing the many ways in which they were deprived of fulfilling lives.
Moreover, the poets sought to raise awareness of injustices that hindered
society at large by fostering inequality and misery among the many disad-
vantaged Victorians. As Aurora Leigh argues in Elizabeth Barrett
Browning’s seminal verse-narrative about the eponymous protagonist,
poets need to “[e]xert a double vision” that enables them to see “near
things” and “distant things” by concentrating on the contemporary world
(Book V, ll. 184, 185, 186). “Their sole work is to represent the age,”
Aurora asserted, “this live, throbbing age” and “[n]ever flinch” from cre-
ating “living art, / Which thus presents and thus records true life” (Book
V, ll. 202, 203, 221–22). New Woman poetry irrefutably evidences that
such advice was deeply inculcated, cultivated, and heeded.
The important issues probed by New Woman poets certainly were not
unique to their work, since an array of novels also explored such contem-
porary conditions. Critical commentary has carefully probed many New
Woman novels to provide enlightening assessments of these once-ignored
texts, and the subgenre has been receiving well-deserved attention. New
© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 1

Switzerland AG 2023
P. Murphy, Poetry of the New Woman, Palgrave Studies in
Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-19765-9_1
2 P. MURPHY
Woman poetry as a complementary subgenre has not experienced such

widespread interest, however, though occasionally verses have surfaced in
anthologies and perspicacious authors have been studied. Yet this late-
century poetry merits far more consideration. In part, this book seeks to
bring the often-neglected poetry to the fore, much of which languishes in
archival collections. Feminist scholars have labored to rescue such work
from obscurity, and their efforts have been invaluable. Nevertheless, many
fine poems have not received the intensive interventions accorded to the
novels, and Victorian scholarship suffers from the omissions.
A Sketch of the New Woman

The literary and cultural figure of the New Woman generated both vocif-
erous condemnation and ardent approbation in the fin de siècle, bringing
the Woman Question that had preoccupied Victorians for multiple decades
into glaring attention. The unconventional individual emerged at a signifi-
cant moment in cultural history when gender roles received intensive scru-
tiny as marriage, motherhood, education, professions, and other issues
came to the fore. To opponents, the New Woman threatened the family,
social stability, and even the viability of the human species. To proponents,
she augured crucial improvements in social mores, female independence,
and personal growth as well as human advancement. Whether vilified or
applauded, the New Woman was certainly not ignored, as indicated by
numerous periodical essays and other texts discussed below.
Detractors launched attacks in general terms to underscore the New
Woman’s ostensible perfidy. Charles G. Harper groused in Revolted
Woman: Past, Present, and to Come that “[s]ociety has been ringing lately
with the writings and doings of the pioneers of the New Woman, who
forget that Woman’s Mission is Submission.” Venomous and incessant
critic Eliza Lynn Linton called the New Woman “a social insurgent [who]
preaches the ‘lesson of liberty’ broadened into lawlessness and license,”
seeking “absolute personal independence coupled with supreme power
over men.”2 Among their supposed characteristics, Linton maintained
that New Women were “[a]ggressive, disturbing, officious, unquiet, rebel-
lious to authority and tyrannous.”3 Sexologist Havelock Ellis warned of
“nothing less than a new irruption of barbarians.” Physical traits also came
under assault. Cornhill Magazine sniffed that the New Woman was a “sal-
low” individual who “has a long face, with a discontented mouth, and a
nose indicative of intelligence, and too large for feminine beauty as
1 INTRODUCTION: MANY VOICES, MANY ISSUES 3
understood by men.” As Sally Ledger observes, caustic remarks about the

New Woman sought “to ridicule and to control renegade women.”4
Supporters pointed to the New Woman’s role in bettering society and
the human condition. Nat Arling asserted that characterizing the New
Woman as “a monstrosity,” “an absurdity,” and “an interloper” came from
“the bigoted and the superficial.” M. Eastwood considered the New
Woman as an advanced example of evolution and noted that “she is adapt-
ing herself with marvellous rapidity” as the world changes. Similarly, to
A. Amy Bulley, the New Woman “can rightly be viewed only as the advance
of a wing of the great human army, and therefore intimately related to the
movement of the other sections”; moreover, “it is only clear that with the
development of society is bound up henceforward the more complete and
perfect evolution of women.” H. E. Harvey contended that New Women
were unjustly condemned for their efforts to improve institutions when
accused of a “wish to overthrow morality and order, and introduce a state
of chaos.” At century’s end, Herbert Jamieson foresaw widespread accep-
tance of modern women and said that “prejudice is dying.” The iconoclas-
tic figure “has only … to be understood properly, and her admirers will be
legion,” he predicted.5
Certainly other advanced women had appeared in literature during pre-
vious decades and could be considered forebears. In fiction, for instance,
Charlotte Brontë’s famed Jane Eyre (1847) brought an independent pro-
tagonist to the Victorian public. Maggie Tulliver in George Eliot’s The
Mill on the Floss (1860) sought to grow intellectually rather than be
shunted into ignorance. Dorothea Brooke similarly yearned for cognitive
stimulation in Middlemarch (1872). In poetry, for example, Aurora Leigh
(1856) featured a strong, compelling individual from childhood to adult-
hood. Augusta Webster challenged the constrictive cultural alliance
between women and nature in several works featured in Portraits (1870).
Yet the fin de siècle witnessed an explosion of literary accounts of advanced
individuals characterized as New Women.
No one definition epitomizes the multivalent New Women, for they
differed in perspectives and priorities. Nonetheless, all New Women
sought a more fulfilling life and greater control over their own destinies.
The multitude of terms designating the controversial individual seemingly
attests to complexity, for the New Woman was called Novissima, a wild
woman, an odd woman, a third sex, an unsexed anomaly, and a shrieking
sister, among other unflattering sobriquets. Although the idea of the New
Woman arose in the early 1880s, likely because of the unconventional
4 P. MURPHY
female protagonist in The Story of an African Farm, the appellation

appeared in 1894 in dueling essays by Sarah Grand and Ouida. The
“Bawling Brotherhood,” wrote Grand, which was familiar with the “cow-
woman,” did not understand “the new woman,” who “proclaimed for
herself what was wrong with Home-is-the-Woman’s-Sphere, and pre-
scribed the remedy.”6 Grand assailed men who had denied educational
advancement and then “jeered at us because we had no knowledge”;
restricted “our outlook on life so that our view of it should be all dis-
torted” and then ridiculed women as “senseless creatures”; and “cramped
our minds,” sneering at their supposed illogicality. Ouida, applying capital
letters to the New Woman, lambasted her for failing to “surrender her
present privileges” but seeking “the lion’s share of power.” Such an “over-
weening and unreasonable grasping at both positions,” Ouida claimed,
ultimately would “end in making her odious to man.” Ouida castigated
the New Woman’s desire for higher education and public life as well as a
supposed distaste of motherhood. The same year as the essays appeared,
Sydney Grundy’s mocking play titled The New Woman made numerous
assaults on the figure. The play derided educational aspirations because
they produce “a Frankenstein”; argued that a man seeks a woman—and
“that’s all,” rather than “brains, accomplishments,” and other “vanities”;
and insisted that traditional gender roles should be upheld rather than
believe that a woman should become “a beastly man,” thus creating “a
new gender.”7
The latter point was frequently adopted as the New Woman was vilified
for being manly or a member of a third sex. Linton, for instance, com-
plained that “Wild Women … are neither man nor woman.” Cornhill
Magazine denounced the New Woman’s dress as “always manly.” Saturday
Review advised in the unambiguously titled “Manly Women” that “the
rage now is for women to appear manly and to copy men in all things; and
a great mistake it is.” Punch proclaimed that New Women were “[e]qually
‘manly’ in dress, work or play.” Among defenders, Emma Churchman
Hewitt insisted that “[t]he masculine woman is no more common than
the effeminate man”; working for her living “no more makes woman mas-
culine than” a husband assisting in child care makes him effeminate.8
Curiously, the New Woman was also accused of being an oversexed,
uncontrolled predator who was undermining the social fabric, even though
many individuals favored celibacy. Fiction writers were censured for, as
Hugh E. M. Stutfield averred in “The Psychology of Feminism,” “literary
scavaging” in “refuse-heaps.” In “Tommyrotics,” this vitriolic adversary
decried “all the prating of passion, animalism, ‘the natural workings of

sex,’ and so forth, with which we are nauseated” and accused writers of
observing life “through sex-maniacal glasses.” James Ashcroft Noble com-
mented that such fiction merely sought to present “an appeal to the sen-
sual instincts of the baser or vulgarer portion of the reading public.”
Margaret Oliphant blasted “[t]his inclination towards the treatment of
subjects hitherto considered immoral or contrary to good manners,” while
Edmund Gosse called the works “tiresome and ugly” and, “in short, they
err grievously against taste.”9
Among the major concerns of opponents was the New Woman’s per-
ceived menace to reproduction and healthy offspring. Since women had
been slowly gaining in opportunities for higher education, critics backed
away from contentions that females lacked the necessary cognitive ability
to succeed in universities and instead blamed intellectual advancement for
jeopardizing humanity’s future. Such brain stress, foes opined, would
draw from the body’s limited supply of energy that was needed for mater-
nity. As physician T. S. Clouston averred, “Why should we spoil a good
mother by making an ordinary grammarian?” Biologist Grant Allen
warned that numerous women “acquired a distaste, an unnatural distaste,
for the functions which nature intended them to perform.” Eugenicist
Karl Pearson cited women’s “prerogative function of child-bearing,” and
he feared that higher education could bring “a physical degradation of the
race, owing to prolonged study having ill effects on woman’s childbearing
efficiency.” Harper sputtered that “nature, which never contemplated the
production of a learned or a muscular woman, will be revenged upon her
offspring”; such women could “peopl[e] the world with stunted and
hydrocephalic children,” bringing forth “the degradation and ultimate
extinction of the race.”10
In contrast, educational proponents held that intellectual stimulation
would produce more effective mothers and improve generations. An
unsigned contribution in Westminster Review, though cautioning about
“serious injury to the health of women from overexercise of brain,” noted
the “beneficial effect” of advanced study for “children borne by such cul-
tured women.” Helen McKerlie countered suppositions that education
would damage women’s reproductive functions and instead argued that
hampering intellectual growth would “reduce women to one dead level of
unintellectual pursuit.” Hewitt argued that “[t]he ‘new’ woman with her
independence, her clearly defined ideas of right and wrong, her knowl-
edge of the world, and her superior education, is far better fitted to be the
6 P. MURPHY
mother of noble men” than an “‘old’ woman with her narrow environ-
ments and her knowledge, which went little beyond household lore.”11
Marriage, like education and reproduction, brought intense debate.
New Woman adversaries maintained that she despised the institution.
Pearson claimed that marriage would be “questioned and remoulded by
the woman’s movement,” and “there can be little doubt that the culti-
vated woman of the future will find herself compelled to reject its doc-
trines.” In a defense of marriage, Walter Besant noted that “Modern
Society is based upon the unit of the family,” and “[t]he family tie means,
absolutely, that the man and the woman are indissolubly united.” In
attacks on fiction, Stutfield argued that “the horrors of matrimony from
the feminine point of view are so much insisted upon nowadays” along
with “the ‘choked up, seething pit’ of matrimony.” Janet E. Hogarth
reproached writers for considering marriage “the head and front of soci-
ety’s offending” behavior. Oliphant assailed fiction that insistently
demeaned the institution and decried “the crusade against marriage now
officially organised and raging around us.”12
New Woman adherents did not overtly reject marriage but sought cru-
cial improvements. Grand believed that “it is upon the perfecting of the
marriage relation that the upward progress of mankind depends.” Harvey
noted that the “necessity for meeting the demands of the marriage market
has given to the sex an artificial character of subservience and servility.”
Mona Caird wrote extensively on the flawed institution in essays as well as
fiction, contending that Victorian marriage enslaved wives. Julia
M. A. Hawksley said that girls needed to be apprised of the nature of mar-
riage rather than being nudged into it without comprehending its ramifi-
cations and being “sacrificed in ignorance.” As Arling put it, the New
Woman “wishes to make marriage no longer an auction of sale to the
highest bidder, or an exercise of tyranny on one side and subjection on the
other, but a covenant of mutual help and service.”13
With all of the complexities associated with the New Woman, it is not
surprising that scholars have devoted attention to the figure in recent
decades. Although much work has centered on fiction, poetry certainly
has been an interest. In the latter twentieth century, anthologies such as
Victorian Women Poets (1995), edited by Angela Leighton and Margaret
Reynolds, features numerous New Woman poems, helping to bring
neglected writers to the fore. Appearing the next decade, Linda K. Hughes’
anthology, New Woman Poets (2001), provides a broad selection of writers
and key verses. Also published that year was Virginia Blain’s Victorian
Women Poets: A New Annotated Anthology, which offers several works by
New Women.
Additional important texts include Leighton’s Victorian Women Poets:
Writing Against the Heart (1992), which discussed work by several late-
Victorian writers, such as Michael Field (Katharine Bradley and Edith
Cooper). Victorian Sappho (1999) by Yopie Prins examines the complex
literary constructions involving the ancient poet and also features Field in
the analysis. Among significant studies appearing in the twenty-first cen-
tury are The Forgotten Female Aesthetes: Literary Culture in Late-Victorian
England (2000) by Talia Schaffer, which explores pioneering texts by
Rosamund Marriott Watson and Alice Meynell, among others; The Fin-de-
Siècle Poem: English Literary Culture and the 1890s (2005), edited by
Joseph Bristow and including essays on several New Woman writers; and
Women Poets and Urban Aestheticism: Passengers of Modernity (2005) by
Ana Parejo Vadillo, which details representations of London by Amy Levy
and other poets. Numerous single-author monographs of New Woman
poets have emerged as well, investigating the writings of such figures as
Levy, Mathilde Blind, and Watson. Of course, many essays also have
appeared in recent decades on many New Woman poets. Although the
above compilation of significant texts cannot be exhaustive, it does convey
the breadth and depth of the subjects addressed in anthologies and
scholarship.
My study primarily explores noncanonical work from a host of note-
worthy writers, some of whom are slowly finding greater recognition and
receiving extended discussion.14 Certain issues in particular engrossed
New Woman poets, and six of those concerns are examined in this book.
Although many vital topics appear in the fin-de-siècle poetry, the six sub-
jects chosen are especially meaningful to consider: marriage, desire, pov-
erty, “fallen women,” metapoetry, and city life. Because this analysis is
necessarily limited in scope, other issues cannot receive elaborate treat-
ment, but nevertheless deserve notice. Therefore, this introduction
reviews several of those matters in appraising the vagaries of love, pur-
ported inferiority, unrealistic expectations, supposed passivity, Eve’s leg-
acy, ecclesiastic misperceptions, maternal thoughts, and cultural
shortcomings. The poems chosen to delineate these topics are extremely
worthwhile to analyze.
8 P. MURPHY
Dying Love
The loss of love in its various manifestations became a frequent and insis-
tent focus of New Woman poetry. For example, three pieces by Augusta
Webster in A Book of Rhyme (1881) poignantly describe the demise of love
in varied states. “Once” presents a sad progression of three stages delin-
eating the speaker’s life, deploying floral imagery to mark each response to
the prospect of love. The first of three eight-line abbbcaca stanzas recounts
a state of innocence, emblematized by a lily, during which the speaker
trusts that the experience of love would be lasting. Only the initial three
lines, mellifluously presented in iambic tetrameter, convey the optimistic
thought, however, succeeded by the disturbing realization that love is
ephemeral.
I set a lily long ago;

I watched it whiten in the sun;
I loved it well, I had but one.
Then summer-time was done,
The wind came and the rain,
My lily bent, lay low.
Only the night-time sees my pain—
Alas, my lily long ago!
The burgeoning whiteness of the lily contributes to the aura of innocence,

underscoring the floral linkages to purity and modesty while foreshadow-
ing other connotations of grief and death.15 With the sun serving as a
signifier of masculinity, the speaker’s ardor swells with the lover’s ongoing
and expanding presence. In accordance with the floral image, the end of
summer provides an apt moment for the lover to leave, and the unpleasant
change in climate intimates the grave effect upon the speaker. Unable to
express or display her sadness, she can only suffer in solitude.
The next stanza follows a similar format, with the first three lines gently
detailing another incidence of love, followed by its painful cessation when
summer has given way to severe weather. A rose provides the floral con-
nection with its resonances to passion and sexuality. The stanza indicates
that the attraction commenced in spring, a time of growth, and the speak-
er’s new relationship also blossomed. The rose’s color intensifies as time
passes, suggesting that the passion has reached its apex and sexuality has
ensued. Yet the lovers’ connection dissolves.
I had a rose-tree born in May;

I watched it burgeon and grow red,
I breathed the perfume that it shed.
Then summer-time had sped,
The frost came with its sleep,
My rose-tree died away.
Only the silence hears me weep—
Alas, lost rose-tree! lost, lost May!
This second relationship takes an even harsher toll on the speaker. Not
only has summer concluded, but its rapid abeyance reveals an even more
transitory enjoyment of love than in the first stanza. Rather than rain and
wind, wintry cold arrives; unlike the lily, which merely leaned when the
climate altered, the rose ceases to exist altogether, eliminating any hope
that the flower will revive. Through the excruciating loss, the speaker can
only sob, with the ambient silence accentuating her disconnection from
life. The final line further relates that this relationship has produced greater
misery than the first, for the word “lost” is emphatically and thricely
uttered.
The final stanza again presents a positive outlook in its beginning.
Spring has returned, and the literal lily and rose will reappear, with no
regard to the unpleasant weather that will again succeed the summer. In
contrast, the speaker does not enjoy such a renaissance. The collapsed
relationships she has endured have caused such serious damage that she no
longer even seeks to search for love again.
The garden’s lily blows once more;

The buried rose will wake and climb;
There is no thought of rain and rime
After next summer-time.
But the heart’s blooms are weak;
Once dead for ever o’er.
Not night, not silence knows me seek
My joy that waned and blooms no more.
The poem’s title augured this resolution of the speaker’s defeats in stress-
ing that these events transpired “once,” never to be repeated. Emotionally
deadened, the speaker cannot undergo more agony wrought by a faith-
less lover.
10 P. MURPHY
Webster’s “Farewell” presents a searing portrait of a couple irretriev-

ably estranged but not physically separated. The opening line evidences
the disjunction, when “we” immediately separates into “two.”
Farewell: we two shall still meet day by day,

Live side by side;
But never more shall heart respond to heart.
Two stranger boats can drift adown one tide,
Two branches on one stem grow green apart.
Farewell, I say.
The stanza is filled with divisions and dualities to mirror the pair’s broken
connection: day/day, side/side, and heart/heart, as well as separate
“stranger boats” wandering aimlessly and branches sharing a stem but
abiding “apart.” Melodic iambic meter belies the discordant state of the
couple’s relationship. The opening “farewell” and its repetition in the final
line reinforce that the bond between the individuals will never be restored,
a pattern repeated in each of the other two abcbca stanzas.
Continuing the thematic approach of the first stanza, the second one char-
acterizes the pair as no more joined than random individuals flung together
simply by circumstance. The interactions between the couple resemble those
of fleeting acquaintances who converse but pursue no further intimacy.
Farewell: chance travellers, as the path they tread,

Change words and smile,
And share their travellers’ fortunes, friend with friend,
And yet are foreign in their thoughts the while,
Several, alone, save that one way they wend.
Farewell; ’tis said.
Like the couple, these strangers share no emotional connection but instead
remain alienated, as emphasized by their being “several, alone” and their
subsequent parting.
In the closing stanza, funereal images stress that no positive resolution
awaits the couple.
Farewell: ever the bitter asphodel

Outlives love’s rose;
The fruit and blossom of the dead for us.
Ah, answer me, should this have been the close,
To be together and be sundered thus?
But yet, farewell.
The asphodel provides an especially apt image as a lily associated with the
grave and with memory lasting beyond death. Similarly, the couple are
doomed to remember their once-promising bond, now eternally dead. A
Homeric link to the asphodel accentuates the inescapable demise, for the
flower appears at gravesites in the underworld. In The Odyssey, “breath-
souls” of the dead abound in a dreary asphodel meadow but retain their
memories (Book 24:14). The ghost of Achilles ominously advises his fel-
low wayfarer Agamemnon that “it was your fate that death would claim
you / Prematurely, before your time, the fate that no one born can escape”
(24:26–27). The asphodel of “Farewell,” not the rose of passion, will pre-
vail, the speaker laments, unable to understand the causative chain leading
to the couple’s wretched state.
The history between the two former lovers and the reason they stay
together remains obscure. Possibilities abound: a spinster grasping onto a
marital prospect to avoid censure, an engagement that cannot be broken
without scandal, spouses who have emotionally or intellectually drifted
apart, a philandering husband who cravenly visits other women, or an
illegitimate pregnancy concealed through a hasty marriage. In each case,
fear of crippling disapprobation provides the sole rationale for the pairing
to continue. In leaving the cause of the emotional separation unknown,
the poem carries a chilling suggestion of universality whereby any couple
could descend into such misery unawares.
Perhaps the “Farewell” pair never truly loved but were driven together
by their youth, proximity, and illusions. Such is the scenario of Webster’s
“In After Years,” which also features a speaker cognizant of the bitter loss
of affection, accentuated by a plethora of trochees. The poem’s fluctua-
tions among the trochees, anapests, and iambs suggest an unsettling dis-
harmony. Adopting a brutal tone, the speaker urges her partner to
recognize in the first of four abcbcaa stanzas that their relationship cannot
be sustained.
Love is dying. Why then, let it die.

Trample it down, that it die more fast.
What is a rose that has lost its bloom?
What is a fruit with its freshness past?
And where is the worth of the twilight gloom?
Let the night come when the day has gone by:
Let the dying die.
12 P. MURPHY
Multiple iterations of death, both in noun and predicate forms, infuse the
poem. The first and last lines of the stanza refer not only to the end of life
but do so twice, leaving no prospect of ardor ever reappearing. The vio-
lence intimated in the second line reflects the speaker’s irrepressible impa-
tience to accept an inevitable outcome and proceed forward. As in
Webster’s “Once” and “Farewell,” this poem deploys floral imagery to
represent the bitter course of passion but intensifies the impression
through the reference to fruit with its deterioration. In questioning the
value of maintaining a relationship in a state preceding death—its “twi-
light gloom”—the speaker is admonishing the partner to reject a delu-
sional hope.
Nothing can restore the amorous feelings, the speaker chides her lover:
“Leave your useless smiles and your tears, / Weepings and wooings are,
oh, so vain!” Moreover, love never even existed, she contends: “Nay, but
say ‘It was always so; / Love was not love in the other years, / There is
nought for tears.’” The language becomes harsher in the third stanza
when the speaker insists that her partner confront the dismal truth.
Say “We lose what was never ours,

Lo, we were fooled by a fond deceit;
Because we chanced to be side by side,
Because we were young and love is sweet,
Love seemed there: but could love have died?
When has decay touched immortal hours?
Love was never ours.”
In the final stanza, the speaker retreats from the scathing tone and instead
questions if the relationship truly had no substantive foundation. Regret
surfaces as she poses a series of queries and wonders if all was only illusory.
Ah, my heart, is it true? is it true?

Did all longings and fears mean no more?
Whispers and vows and the gladness mean this?
What, we grow wiser when years are o’er,
And weary in soul of a mimic bliss?
Did we but dream, hand in hand, we two?
Must it needs be true?
In effect, the speaker is uttering sentiments that her partner would

likely express. In an odd way, the pair come together only in ruing loss,
not in sharing affection.
Vagaries of Love
The element of chance that the speaker credits for the relationship also
surfaces in E. (Edith) Nesbit’s “Vies Manquées” albeit in a different con-
figuration. Disjunctive timing undermines reciprocal affection, and no
gratifying result appears in the seven-quatrain abab poem, which was
included in Lays and Legends (1886). The speaker recalls the situation a
year previously when the pair had wandered “the happy woodland ways”
replete with nature’s spring bounties. The initial stanzas recount the set-
ting in detail: a blackbird tends to her nest, a thrush warbles amid expand-
ing foliage, a dusky sky transforms branches from winter to spring
coloration, and masses of flowers flourish. The portrait of the woods con-
veys harmony, peace, and promise. Yet the companions do not fully absorb
the scene and reflect upon its beauty but instead react to their surround-
ings from very diverse perspectives. She does not reciprocate his deep
affection and therefore “missed the meaning of the world / From lack of
love for you.” In contrast, he feels too overwhelmed by his emotions, both
positive and negative, to attend to the idyllic setting, the speaker states.
You missed the beauty of the year,

And failed its self to see,
Through too much doubt and too much fear,
And too much love of me.
Yet the situation sharply reverses in the next year when they again walk
through the springtime forest with its attractions revived. The speaker
regrets that the pair will never experience the same feelings simultaneously
for a reason that “we shall never find.” Again the woodland beauties
receive little notice from the pair as they grapple with their antipodal
emotions.
Our drifted spirits are not free

Spring’s secret springs to touch,
For now you do not care for me,
And I love you too much.
14 P. MURPHY
As in the Webster poems, no satisfactory resolution appears possible, with

no hint that the situation will alter and the pair’s emotional timing become
synchronized.
Mathilde Blind’s “The Forest Pool,” which appeared in Birds of Passage:
Songs of the Orient and Occident (1885), offers an even darker picture of
unsuccessful love. Composed of four aabb stanzas, the poem depicts a
woodland setting in a depressing manner rather than present the pastoral
attractions of Nesbit’s verse. The atmosphere is established as the poem
opens, with the titular pool so “[l]ost amid gloom and solitude” that it is
concealed, and flowers are not praised for their blooms but are character-
ized by their shadows. The next stanza heightens the impression of dreari-
ness in the lifeless environment.
Bare as a beggar’s board, the trees

Stand in the water to their knees;
The birds are mute, but far away
I hear a bloodhound’s sullen bay.
The third stanza augurs a shift in tone, but the impression endures only
momentarily. The speaker describes a bucolic scene of flowers “[k]issed by
a little laughing brook” as well as by her partner. Yet the quatrain’s last line
ruthlessly undercuts the promising scenario, for the forget-me-nots
“[f]loat in the water drowned and dead.” In the closing quatrain, the rela-
tionship of the speaker and her lover is even more excruciating.
And dead and drowned ‘mid leaves that rot,

Our angel-eyed Forget-me-not,
The love of unforgotten years,
Floats corpse-like in a pool of tears.
A death of a different sort caused by love defines May Probyn’s “Ballade

of Lovers: Double Refrain,” which was published in A Ballad of the Road,
and Other Poems (1883). The poem consists of an ababbaba rhyme
scheme, a concluding envoi, and disturbing dual refrains; the first indicates
that the woman holds scant importance and the second relates that
through extreme dependency upon her partner, she loses any sense of her
own subjectivity. The initial stanza elucidates that she represents little
more than a decorative object to him. “For the man she was made by the
Eden tree,” the poem begins, “[t]o be decked in soft raiment, and worn
on his sleeve.” Underlining her status as an object, the first refrain refers
to her as “[a] thing to take, or a thing to leave.” She becomes so immersed
in him that she devolves into a cipher, never to regain status as a subject;
through his presence, “her soul will escape her beyond reprieve.” The
second refrain reinforces her self-effacement: “And, alas! the whole of her
world is he.”
The next stanza reiterates that she holds no consequence for him, and
his seeming shows of affection are disingenuous since other women are
readily available. Despite her knowledge of his disloyalty, she cannot wrest
herself from his influence and grovels before him.
To-morrow brings plenty as lovesome, maybe—

If she break when he handles her, why should he grieve?
She is only one pearl in a pearl-crowded sea,
A thing to take, or a thing to leave.
But she, though she knows he has kissed to deceive
And forsakes her, still only clings on at his knee—
When life has gone, what further loss can bereave?
And, alas! the whole of her world is he.
The third stanza repeats the point made in the poem’s opening line that
“[f]or the man was she made.” Like the paradigmatic self-sacrificing
Victorian woman, she apparently exists only to serve the male who has laid
claim to her, becoming his “helpmeet what time there is burden to heave.”
She can merely follow his lead and conform herself to his wants and needs,
“to interweave / Her woof with his warp.” Such behavior will continue
until he tires of her and seeks to shed the clutching spider by “clear[ing]
his way out through her web.”
Even if a woman avoids such an all-encompassing loss of subjectivity,
another manifestation of self-effacement occurs when her driving ambi-
tion is to marry, despite the deficiencies and disparagements of a prospec-
tive mate. The scenario reflects a cultural supposition that she ignore such
flaws and accept an unworthy lover nonetheless. Constance Naden’s 1881
“Love versus Learning” entails a troubling portrait of an intelligent woman
whose dominant concern from girlhood is to find a wise husband and
become “a philosopher’s bride.” In her musings, she envisioned him as
“learned and witty, / The sage and the lover combined.” Yet in actuality
she succumbs to an unworthy Oxford graduate with an advanced degree,
despite her uncertainty about the match; “fate overtook me at last,” she
realizes, and her “freedom was past.”
16 P. MURPHY
She later comprehends that she had sorely misjudged him and her
“visions are fatally marred.” Asserting that he resembles “neither a sage
nor a bard,” she learns that he has become entrenched in ideas absorbed
as a student and recognizes no necessity to expand his thoughts. Then
begin his patronizing denigrations of his companion’s intellectual talents.
My logic he sets at defiance,

Declares that my Latin’s no use,
And when I begin to talk Science
He calls me a dear little goose.
He says that my lips are too rosy
To speak in a language that’s dead,
And all that is dismal and prosy
Should fly from so sunny a head.
The realization of her lover’s unfitness frequently leads her to consider

abandoning him, but he spews forth quasi-scientific compliments that she
accepts nevertheless. Even though she finds “[t]his conflict of love and of
lore” quite bewildering, she unfortunately decides that “I must cease from
my musing, / For that is his knock at the door!”
If a woman wishes to forge her own path, unlike the protagonist of
“Love versus Learning,” and pursue a substantive life not dependent on a
male’s selfish interests, she faces the prospect that a loving relationship
cannot occur. Another Naden poem, “The Lady Doctor,” makes the
problem abundantly clear. As an adolescent, the protagonist possessed
“[t]he golden hair, the blooming face, / And all a maiden’s tender grace.”
She was enamored with a youth but lost her affection through an unknown
cause, possibly because of his opinions or aggressiveness. Deserting her
stricken lover, she turns to medicine and earns her degree, still “young and
fair, / With rosy cheeks and golden hair, / Learning with beauty
blended.”16 Yet the exigencies of her profession transform her into a care-
worn, rapidly aging woman whose “roses all were faded.” She has deterio-
rated into a “spinster gaunt and grey, / Whose aspect stern might well
dismay / A bombardier stout-hearted.” To an observer, she seems
unsexed, a frequent criticism hurled at New Women, and appears like “a
man in woman’s clothes, / All female graces slighting.” The toll her pro-
fession has taken is exemplified by “[t]he woe of living all alone, / In
friendless, dreary sadness,” and she thinks longingly of affectionate
companionship. The poem concludes with a dispiriting moral that a
Victorian woman can choose either a rewarding profession or a mate, but

not both.
Fair maid, if thine unfettered heart

Yearn for some busy, toilsome part,
Let that engross thee only;
But oh! if bound by love’s light chain,
Leave not thy fond and faithful swain
Disconsolate and lonely.
Although New Woman poems, like the preceding examples, tend to

present love in disheartening terms, an occasional exception arises. Even
in that more optimistic situation, however, obstacles materialize.
Rosamund Marriott Watson’s “Hic Jacet” from Vespertilia and Other
Voices (1895) provides a case in point, as the funereal title indicates with
its translation of “here lies.” The speaker is confounded that a deep, shared
love will become meaningless and disintegrate through death.
And is it possible?—and must it be—

At last, indifference ’twixt you and me?
We who have loved so well,
Must we indeed fall under that strange spell,
The tyranny of the grave?
The protagonist continues to question the inevitability of death dividing

the lovers and causing them to forget each other. She finds it difficult to
accept that the intense emotions they reciprocate will simply cease to exist.
Shall not my pulses leap if you be near?

Shall these endure, the sun, the wind, the rain,
And naught of all our tenderness remain,
Our joy—our hope—our fear? …
Ultimately, the speaker realizes that to “rail or weep, / Plead or defy, take
counsel as we may, / It shall not profit us.” Instead, she places her hopes
on chance, “the blind powers,” that the pair will live and love for as long
as possible. Rather than despair completely of the situation, the speaker
urges that the couple value their love in the limited time ahead.
Nevertheless, the prospect of death, whenever it may occur, looms over
the poem and generates an unavoidable tension.
18 P. MURPHY
Unsettling Misconceptions
Not only the vagaries of love trouble New Women, of course, but also the
myths readily accepted by a Victorian culture shaped by an essentialist
perspective. M. E. Coleridge’s 1899 “In Dispraise of the Moon” from her
Poems adopts the lunar image to illustrate the disparagement of women as
inferior beings. Composed of three aabb stanzas, the poem begins with a
demeaning portrait of the moon, the conventional symbol of women in
contrast to the masculine sun. Presumably spoken by a male, the initial
stanza carries an unpleasant tone. The moon is depicted as a witch-like
presence with its ability to attract predatory birds and vampiric creatures.
Contrasted to the weak moon is the exalted sun, whose stellar quality the
moon besmirches through its debilitating influence.
I would not be the Moon, the sickly thing,

To summon owls and bats upon the wing;
For when the noble Sun is gone away,
She turns his night into a pallid day.17
Pernicious and parasitic, the moon relies upon the sun’s luminescence for
its subsistence like a traditional Victorian female dependent on a male for
guidance and sustenance. The woman represented by the moon only
amounts to a distasteful specter of the culturally powerful male.
She hath no air, no radiance of her own,

That world unmusical of earth and stone.
She wakes her dim, uncoloured, voiceless hosts,
Ghost of the Sun, herself the sun of ghosts.
Building upon suppositions about the moon’s destruction of sanity, the

final stanza cautions against lengthy observation. Otherwise, “[m]ortal
eyes that gaze too long on her / Of Reason’s piercing ray defrauded are.”
Unlike the vitalizing powers of the sun, the moonlight brings harm.
Though sunlight “doth feed the living brain,” the stanza concludes,
“[t]hat light, reflected, but makes darkness plain.”
Dora Sigerson’s “The Awakening,” published in Verses (1893), demon-
strates the absurdity of tenets propounding female inferiority. The speaker
regrets that her dearth of sufficient erudition precludes her as a suitable
partner for the man she loves, and she pleads for enhanced learning.
“Knowledge, be my master,” she beseeches before demanding, “Turn

brain, O faster. / Grind the seeds of wisdom fine, / Till no mind be wise
as mine.” Subsequently, however, she realizes that she had misjudged her
love, who was just a fool with “[m]uch the chaff and little wheat.” His
assertions of an advanced mind prove groundless, since “[a]ll his thoughts
[were] a borrowed store.”
This false light that made my day

Was the sun’s reflected ray,
Dancing broken on the wave
Of ignorance, nor can I save
One tossing spark of foolish light
To make a beacon for my night.
Blind for love’s sweet sake to be,
Seeing is a misery.
Just as unnerving as the denigration accorded women for their sup-

posed intellectual mediocrity is the misguided idealization that typified
much Victorian thought. Naden’s 1887 “Love’s Mirror” chronicles a
man’s unrealistic assessment of a woman as a goddess figure resembling
the valorized and widely accepted impression of the Virgin Mary.18 The
poem also advises that such a cultural appraisal harms women by convinc-
ing them of the validity of the impossible standard. In the first two of five
stanzas, the speaker recognizes both that her partner appraises her as an
exemplar of the ideal and realizes the enormity of his misjudgment.
I live with love encompassed round,

And glowing light that is not mine,
And yet am sad; for, truth to tell,
It is not I you love so well;
Some fair Immortal, robed and crowned,
You hold within your heart’s dear shrine.
As the longest in the poem, this stanza assumes the greatest weight in
asserting the ideal as a faulty norm. The next stanza prods the lover to
dismiss his erroneous belief, accept the flawed speaker, and understand
that perfection cannot be attained. The two words introducing the stanza
can be read as a spondee that underscores the forceful message.
20 P. MURPHY
Cast out the Goddess! let me in;

Faulty I am, yet all your own,
But this bright phantom you enthrone
Is such as mortal may not win.
The poem begins a daunting turn, however, as the woman expresses a

wish to embody the idealized paradigm. She urges her lover to retain the
perfect image in memory, and she will endeavor to transform herself. At
first, her intention appears admirable as she seeks to emulate the goddess
figure so that “all my meaner self departs.” Yet that desire indicates not
simply the wish to become a better person, albeit a human who cannot
correct every shortcoming. Instead, she imagines herself attaining the ideal.
And, while I love you more and more,

My spirit, gazing on the light,
Becomes, in loveliness and might,
The glorious Vision you adore.
Word choice reinforces the speaker’s absorption of an unattainable objec-

tive promoted by her culture. Rather than rejecting the unrealistic impera-
tive and reiterating that she must be accepted as an imperfect being, the
speaker etherealizes herself as a “spirit” reaching the heights of beauty and
strength to become the image her lover worships.
The inadvisability of cultural expectations governing appropriate female
conduct becomes abundantly apparent with May Kendall’s “In the Toy
Shop,” included in Songs from Dreamland (1894). The three-stanza
ababcdcd verse juxtaposes two approaches to gender expectations in fea-
turing a living girl and a wooden doll speculating on their situations.19 The
first stanza depicts the actual girl as rebellious and assertive, facing pres-
sure to meet validated standards of behavior. If read as an emphatic tro-
chee, the “she” introducing multiple lines highlights the girl’s forceful
personality. The child epitomizes a nascent New Woman who understands
that a girl with inclinations considered unseemly cannot accommodate
societal dictates.
The child had longings all unspoken—

She was a naughty child.
She had “a will that must be broken”;
Her brothers drove her wild.
She read the tale, but skipped the moral.
She thought: “One might be good,

If one could never scream and quarrel,
If one were only wood!”
In contrast, the doll rues that she lacks the energy to defy expectations
of quiet behavior, a point reinforced by her pronouns being unstressed.
Rather, she yearns to act against tradition and challenge delimiting
presumptions.
Meanwhile the doll: “Ah, fatal chasm!

Although I’ve real curls,
I am not made of protoplasm,
Like other little girls.
You see on every wooden feature
My animation’s nil.
How nice to be a human creature,
Get cross, and have a will!”
The doll seems to recognize that change is occurring around her, but the
movement toward expanded freedom is bypassing her. The “fatal chasm”
represents two distinct ways to live: adopting or rejecting gender limita-
tions. She is missing the “protoplasm” required for an organism to exist
and direct its own path, and thus be truly alive. Unlike the actual girl, the
doll has no resoluteness that would propel her to a full life.
The chasm informs the final stanza, which further compares the doll
with the girl and deems the former deficient. The doll’s inability to become
her own agent clashes with the girl’s refusal to accept artificial norms. The
doll’s lament is coupled with her understanding that an embrasure of New
Woman resistance leads to pain and setbacks, although the battle contin-
ues despite obstacles.
But some of us are nervous tissue,

And some of us are wood.
And some to suffering, striving wildly,
Are never quite resigned;
While we of wood yet murmur mildly
At being left behind.
The passivity demonstrated by the doll is rejected by another New

Woman in a Dora Sigerson Shorter poem appearing shortly after Queen
22 P. MURPHY
Victoria’s death. Rather than accede to the belief that females should
avoid aggressive actions that a male is expected to perform, the protago-
nist demonstrates agency. “Love in Disguise” from As the Sparks Fly
Upward: Poems and Ballads (1903) features a male narrator recounting
the forceful approach of a woman that appalls him. Although he grieves
under the assumption that his lover Phyllis has been untrue, the man
never reveals her supposed transgression, but with his distorted views
about appropriate female behavior, his complaint likely lacks foundation.
As he rests outdoors preoccupied with his sadness over the rift with his
lover, a passing woman whom he considers a nymph assumes the role of
a male suitor. She merely holds his hand, but he responds with horror:
“Her boldness I did much upbraid, / And said: ‘Begone, thou wanton
maid; / I seek no love of thine!” Feeling “all stricken with disdain,” he
melodramatically calls for death because of the supposedly disloyal Phyllis.
From the speaker’s perspective, the situation with the “nymph” becomes
even more alarming as the disguised woman clasps him “in a close
embrace,” causing him to reiterate his “Begone!” The man again decries
her forwardness, effusing that “I hold thy boldness in disdain.” The
poem concludes when the woman lifts her veil and exposes her true iden-
tity as the maligned Phyllis. Although he does not disclose his feelings for
her when she reveals herself, no suggestion exists that he will emotionally
embrace his former lover. Considering his disgusted tone and the exclam-
atory punctuation deployed in his earlier utterances, his final words—
“My Phyllis smiled on me!”—suggest that he will be unable to shift from
repulsion to acceptance.
Eve’s Supposed Legacy

Among the numerous misconceptions that New Woman poetry assailed
was the impression that women were manifestations of the sinful Eve who
wrought misery upon all ensuing generations. Eva Gore-Booth’s “The
Repentance of Eve,” which appeared in the author’s Poems (1898), assaults
the condemnation of Eve alone when Adam also partook of the disastrous
apple. The blame heaped upon Eve for devastating the future of humanity
will never ebb, the poem predicts. Although plunged into despair and
regret for her transgression, Eve will suffer for all time, the first of the two
abab stanzas relates.
This is our Mother Eve, who shall not win

Respite or peace; in vain she makes lament
She ate but half the fruit, sinned half the sin,
Eternal hunger is her punishment.
In identifying Eve as “our Mother,” the quatrain implies that her female
descendants will feel the onus of her sin. Like Eve, women will forever
carry the burden for paradisical loss and share her “eternal hunger.”
A. Mary F. Robinson’s “Adam and Eve” from Songs, Ballads, and a
Garden Play (1888) subtly places blame on both of the original humans.20
Adam, the poem relates, created Eve in accordance with his objective,
which makes him accountable for Eve’s transgression since without his
intercession his future companion would not have existed. As her creator,
Adam would be fully cognizant that the ultimate sin was inevitable and
thus not only share her guilt but be the primary cause of the devastat-
ing result.
When Adam fell asleep in Paradise

He made himself a helpmeet as he dreamed;
And lo! she stood before his waking eyes,
And was the woman that his vision seemed.
The second stanza positions Adam as more culpable than Eve in that she
gains her character from him rather than choose to sin without his influ-
ence. Adam’s iniquity burgeons through his assumption of divine author-
ity with Eve’s birth and a disturbing hubris, since biblical accounts
unambiguously relate that God created her. The poem connects Adam to
Eve’s existence because of his rib forming her and thus she would reflect
him to some degree.
She knelt beside him there in tender awe

To find the living fountain of her soul,
And so in either’s eyes the other saw
The light they missed in Heaven, and knew the goal.
As a “fountain,” Adam is her origin; like a fountainhead, he is the source

of her being. Eve looks to Adam as a quasi-divinity as she prostrates herself
before him. The guilt for the Original Sin belongs to them both; in gazing
at each other, they recognize that they share the same “goal” of incredi-
ble power.
24 P. MURPHY
The last of the three stanzas, which departs from the quatrain format in
an ababcc rhyme scheme, serves as a pronounced final statement of Adam’s
complicity. Although Eve “brought thee for her dowry death and shame”
and also “taught thee one may worship and deceive,” Adam holds the
main responsibility; his vision and Eve “were still the same.” Furthermore,
Adam is linked to the demonic Lilith, identified in some accounts as his
first wife. According to one version of her history, Lilith rebelled against
God and left Adam in the Garden of Eden; she was also thought to become
a destroyer of newborns as the agent of disease. The final lines of Robinson’s
poem stress that Eve had no part in Adam’s involvement with the loath-
some Lilith.
Whether Eve’s story led to dissatisfaction with the Church among some
New Women poets presents an unanswerable question, but criticism or
rejection of organized religion certainly appeared in fin-de-siècle verse.
Although many New Women writers were or became staunch Christians,
such as the Michael Field partners, others expressed their very different
judgments about faith. One of the most forceful non-believers, Naden
wrote broadly in poetry as well as prose that matter, instead of conven-
tional spirituality, was the vital element to recognize. Naden’s 1887 “The
Nebular Theory” credits non-religious forces in its alternative reading of
creation events through a reworking of the Genesis accounts, as James
R. Moore comments.21 The poem identifies cosmic energy rather than
divine intervention for the origin of the universe, resembling the theory
that the scientific world found unconvincing.22 Nevertheless, the hypoth-
esis informs the poem, which immediately announces that it is promoting
an alternative to the Christian story. This version is accorded credence in
part through the hard end-stopped first line; thereafter, only the closing
line finishes with this most assertive of punctuation marks reinforcing the
opening declarative sentence with analogous content. The poem proceeds
to delineate the stages of creation, with resonances to the biblical Genesis
being reshaped.
This is the genesis of Heaven and Earth.

In the beginning was a formless mist
Of atoms isolate, void of life; none wist
Aught of its neighbour atom, nor any mirth,
Nor woe, save its own vibrant pang of dearth;
Until a cosmic motion breathed and hissed
And blazed through the black silence; atoms kissed,
Clinging and clustering, with fierce throbs of birth,

And raptures of keen torment, such as stings
Demons who wed in Tophet; the night swarmed
With ringèd fiery clouds, in glowing gyres
Rotating: aeons passed: the encircling rings
Split into satellites; the central fires
Froze into suns; and thus the world was formed.
Direct usurpations from Genesis appear throughout the verse, most evi-
dently in the first three lines, which in the biblical narrative read “In the
beginning God created the heaven and the earth, and the earth was with-
out form and void.” The poem’s reference to the mist parallels the Bible,
which states that “there went up a mist from the earth” and that God gave
Adam “the breath of life” (2:6,7). Naden’s “atoms” evidence a subtle revi-
sion of Adam, and the eventual illumination reminds of the Genesis state-
ment, “God said, Let there be light: and there was light” (1:3). The
poem’s concluding line directly borrows from the Genesis version: “Thus
the heavens and the earth were finished, and all the host of them” (2:1).
M. E. Coleridge, writing under the Greek name “Anodos” in Fancy’s
Following (1896), posits in “Self-Question” that nature and art entail suf-
ficient substitutes for a belief in infinite existence.23 Composed of two
abab quatrains, the poem chides and disparages the reader for the inability
to value the two material elements.
Is this wide world not large enough to fill thee,

Nor Nature, nor that deep man’s Nature, Art?
Are they too thin, too weak and poor to still thee,
Thou little heart?
In the second quatrain, the speaker reminds that humanity began and will
end in dust, “[a] spark of fire within a beating clod.” The poem presup-
poses that the spark lasts eternally and leaves the reader with the thought-
provoking question as to its source: “must it be God?”
Another entry in Coleridge’s Fancy’s Following takes a different
approach by rejecting organized religion and embracing an individual ver-
sion of faith. Resembling “Self-Question” in its format, “Every Man for
His Own Hand” prizes the personal over the communal. “I may not call
what many call divine,” the speaker remarks, but “my faith is faith in its
degree.” The valuation of solitude permeates the poem. The speaker
26 P. MURPHY
“worship[s] at a dim and lonely shrine” in the first quatrain, and the motif
fully shapes the second stanza.
The secret grace of faith’s celestial part

I hoard up safely for mine own self’s own;
Within the hidden chambers of the heart
I love alone.
The second line especially conveys the solitary preference with its repeti-
tion of individuality through “mine own self’s own.”
The rejection of traditional religious practice that these poems express
may cause a dismaying reaction, as Blind’s “The Agnostic” demonstrates.
Included in Birds of Passage (1895), the sonnet devotes its octave to an
explanation for refusing to connect with God in dire situations.
Not in the hour of peril, thronged with foes,

Panting to set their heel upon my head,
Or when alone from many wounds I bled
Unflinching beneath Fortune’s random blows;
Not when my shuddering hands were doomed to close
The unshrinking eyelids of the stony dead;—
Not then I missed my God, not then—but said:
“Let me not burden God with all man’s woes!”
The sestet shifts to the moments when the speaker feels a forceful urge to
bond with God that arise amid glorious sights. Presumably, the speaker is
experiencing the sublime, where a sense of awe and respect for a divine
presence becomes overwhelming. Indeed, one is reminded of William
Wordsworth’s musings in The Prelude when the speaker happens upon an
extraordinary natural vista. Blind’s sestet identifies various locales that
elevate the speaker’s consciousness so loftily that common nouns take on
the trappings of proper nouns through capitalization; aspects of the natu-
ral world become personified as they wave, flash, and laugh; and light
imagery threads through the stanza. Yet the speaker becomes irreconcil-
ably frustrated because gratitude cannot be offered to a divine being that
has been rejected.
But when resurgent from the womb of night

Spring’s Oriflamme of flowers waves from the Sod
When peak on flashing Alpine peak is trod
By sunbeams on their missionary flight;

When heaven-kissed Earth laughs, garmented in light;—
That is the hour in which I miss my God.
The sonnet captures sentiments that seem corollaries of agnosticism.

Reliance on the self through trying times becomes a source of pride, but
the inability to connect with the creator of beauty undercuts the sense of
satisfaction.
Musings on Motherhood
On a more positive note, motherhood becomes a source of happiness in
varied New Woman poems, though sometimes tempered by unsettling
realities. Nesbit’s “Baby Song” in Lays and Legends (1892) features a lov-
ing mother encouraging her infant to rest. Peaceful and comforting allu-
sions prevail in the six-stanza aaba poem: animals return to their nests and
folds; flowers sleep; and angels watch carefully. When “good, glad morn-
ing’s here,” the mother asks the baby to awaken and effuses about joyous
nature while again asserting her love.
Wake, baby dear!

Thy mother’s waiting near,
And love, and flowers, and birds, and sun,
And all things bright and dear.
Yet the absolute picture of happiness that the poem presents is prob-
lematized in another Nesbit poem, “Lullaby,” from the same collection.
Initially, the poem stresses both the mother’s absolute love and vigilant
oversight. No one, including the mother of God, could love her child
more than does the speaker, she believes. With a simple aabb rhyme that is
suitable for a baby’s song, the eight-stanza poem assures the infant that he
will be painstakingly protected and kept secure.
Lie here quiet on mother’s arm,

Safe from harm;
Nestled closely to mother’s breast,
Sleep and rest!
28 P. MURPHY
Mother feels your breath’s soft stir

Close to her;
Mother holds you, clasps you tight,
All the night.
Despite her devotion, the mother realizes that the moment will come
when she cannot deflect harm and the son will face the trials that all indi-
viduals undergo.
Sleep, my darling, sleep while you may—

Sorrow dawns with the dawning day,
Sleep, my baby, sleep, my dear,
Soon enough will the day be here.
The poem’s final line accentuates the inevitability of tribulations in the

baby’s later years: “All too soon will the day be here.”
A different concern arises in Dollie Radford’s “What Song Shall I
Sing?” from A Light Load (1891). In the ababcc three-stanza verse, the
speaker has put “the wee ones” to bed and is deciding on a song as well as
books to share. Maternal affection suffuses the first stanza depicting the
children’s bedtime. “Now each little sleepy head / Is tucked away on pil-
low white, / All snug and cosy for the night.” The second stanza, how-
ever, reveals a wistfulness that other singers and writers are presenting
their work as she says, “But I can sing, these evening times, / Only the
children’s songs and rhymes.” Being totally immersed in the children’s
lives as the days proceed, the speaker in the final stanza cannot turn her
thoughts to adults’ artistic creations.
All the day they play with me,

My heart grows full of their looks,
All their prattle stays with me,
And I have no mind for books,
Nor care for any other tune
Than they have sung this golden June.
As Leeanne Marie Richardson observes, the verse explores a “meta-poetic

concern: the difficulty of combining the work of a poet with the work of a
mother.”24 Yet “What Song Shall I Sing?” offers no solutions to the vexing
problem.
Webster’s unfinished sonnet sequence, Mother and Daughter (1895),

contains many moving poems about motherhood in various moods and
stages. Among the most interesting, sonnet twenty captures the bitter-
sweet moment of a mother whose daughter has matured. Although “she
is to-day, dearer and more; / Closer to me, since sister womanhoods
meet,” the mother regrets the loss of her little girl. “There’s one I miss,”
the speaker relates, the “little questioning maid” who filled the mother’s
life so expansively. “I miss the approaching sound of pit-pat feet, / The
eager baby voice outside my door.”
Although the poems discussed here demonstrate maternal affection
and tenderness, Katharine Tynan presents a divergent case in “The Fairy
Foster-Mother” from Ballads and Lyrics (1891). The poem reminds of
Mona Caird’s criticism of motherhood as entrapment in The Daughters of
Danaus (1894), in which protagonist Hadria Temperley characterizes it as
“the sign and seal as well as the means and method of a woman’s bond-
age.”25 Tynan’s allegorical verse recounts the story of Ailie Carroll, who
deserts her family to become “a fairy’s nurse.” She responds to the
implorations of the fairy king, whose wife died in childbirth and left the
baby “dwindling every day / For mother’s love and milk.” Though “her
own wee troublesome lad / May pine,” Ailie refuses to return to him and
her “crazed and sad” spouse. Mapped onto contemporary motherhood,
the poem illustrates the situation of a wife and mother so unsatisfied by
her domestic existence that she chooses another man as well as his child.
The poem thus presents a curious scenario with Ailie leaving one family
and replacing it with another, presumably providing a better match for her
temperament and inclinations. Perhaps the poem is exemplifying Hadria’s
criticism of motherhood as a trap that cannot be escaped.
Yet the poem is substantially removed from other Tynan pieces about
motherhood that indubitably value it rather than seek an escape.
“Maternity,” included in Poems (1901), relates a woman’s eagerness to
provide sustenance to her baby with her “sacred body of Motherhood.”
So exalting is the maternal state described in the two-stanza aaba verse
that she opens her heart to embrace “all earth’s hapless brood.” Another
poem in the collection, “Talisman,” features a woman who holds “[a]ll
Heaven in my arm.” The baby seems magical to her, a “charm” that wards
off hurt. The mother expresses her elation in the second of two stanzas.
O mouth, full of kisses!

Small body of blisses!
30 P. MURPHY
Your hand on my neck

And your cheek to my cheek.
What shall hurt me or harm
With all Heaven in my arm?
Social Duty
The compassion and selflessness displayed in many motherhood poems
emerges on a broader scale in New Woman verses advocating social jus-
tice. Shifting from the personal to the public realm, the poems cover a
range of issues in their exhortations for fairness and freedom, as the fol-
lowing examples indicate. Graham R. Tomson’s “On the Road” from The
Bird-Bride: A Volume of Ballads and Sonnets (1889) indicates that substan-
tive change is a long-term objective with current work merely an interim
stage. The arduous journey poses daunting obstacles that prevent efforts
from coming to fruition at the present time. As the refrain of the six-stanza
poem stresses, “The road is long,” and results will not appear during con-
temporary lifetimes; rather, “[t]he fruit will fall when we ourselves are
clay.” Opponents seek to derail social progress but ultimately will not pre-
vail, the poem stresses: “The gaunt grey wolves are famished for their prey,
/ But we are bound, and hungrier than they.” Repeatedly the poem warns
that only initial steps are being taken, and future generations must con-
tinue the efforts.
The sands of Tyranny are slow to run.

Alas! that this and many a morrow’s sun
Must see the goal ungained, the work undone!
The road is long.
Our lives were ladder-rungs: the Cause moves on;

The light shines fair as ever it has shone;
‘Twill blaze full bright ere many long years be gone—
The road is long.
We are but bubbles breaking in the sea,

The strong slow tide that one day will be free;
We shall not know it—yea, but it will be:
The road is long.
The poem forms a mantra of sorts, with the rhyme consistent in the
initial three lines of each stanza. One can imagine a gathering of progres-
sive individuals proclaiming their objectives and buttressing their resolve.
L. S. Bevington’s “The Secret of the Bees,” found in Liberty Lyrics
(1895), employs the insects’ endeavors as an allegory for human aspira-
tion. The verse features an interrogatory section of nine couplets suc-
ceeded by the “Answer” in seven couplets. The speaker queries the bees
about their success in producing an equitable society that humans have
been unable to achieve.
How have you managed it? bright busy bee!

You are all of you useful, yet each of you free.
What man only talks of, the busy bee does;
Shares food, and keeps order, with no waste of buzz.
The question portion of the poem raises several problems that bees have
avoided and carries a socialist tone. The bee world has no taxes, rents,
“property tyrants, no big-wigs of State.” All bees have equal rights with
“[f]ree access to flowers, free use of all wings.” No battles are sought for
spurious recognition or for pecuniary advantage, and the bee society
avoids “over-work, under-work, glut of the spoil.” The final question
wonders in general how bees have achieved a healthy society that enables
all to enjoy financial comfort and freedom in an orderly communal system.
In the answer section, the bees see no reason that such a vibrant social
order should not exist. They have no masters, money is inconsequential,
and all comfortably coexist without guile “in one nest,” with “[n]one
hindering other from doing her best.” Their success, the bees say, is simply
a matter of “sheer Common-Sense.”
For Isabella J. Southern, diversity among the human population must
be recognized and valued, “[f]or two alike thou shalt look earnestly in
vain!” Titled “Variety” and consisting of four abab stanzas, the poem was
published in Sonnets and Other Poems (1891) and offers both nature and
art as arguments for tolerance. After citing discrete differences among
individuals, the poem adopts an analogy from nature to underscore the
“immense variety of shape and hue” among trees and plants, all distinct
from each other. None suffers discrimination, with even the most vulner-
able in size able to “be its own true self, to drink from earth and dew.”
Proceeding to the human world, the poem comments that diverse books
carry value because of their individuality.
32 P. MURPHY
Thy books are many, and ’twould be a childish thought

Shouldst thou desire that all should tell the self-same tale.
Their value lies therein, that through them thou art brought
To feel that minds are various, as are hill and dale.
The poem’s closing quatrain takes a Darwinian turn in reminding that

variety participates in the evolutionary process. Moreover, through evolu-
tion come more and more dissimilarity and diversification. This “universal
law of life,” the poem concludes, will be unstoppable. The implication is
clear: refusal to value diversity violates natural law.
Although many New Woman poems about social justice approach the
topic in general terms, specific instances of concern appear as well. Gore-
Booth’s “Clouds” from Poems (1898) regrets the course of events in
Ireland but believes that a far more hopeful future awaits. A dedicated
advocate of a liberated Ireland, Gore-Booth considers the island in its cur-
rent condition as dead and bereft, as the first two of five aabb stanzas
depict. In the first, Ireland is out of rhythm with both nature and the
universe, while the second quatrain focuses on the misery of the inhabitants.
Drooping over Ireland, veiled in sombre gray,

See the sky is weeping all its light away;
Heedless of the magic music of the spheres
Drooping over Ireland, land of falling tears.
Land of falling tears and broken promises;
Land of idle slaves and famine and distress,
Land of crime and struggle, and of futile strife,
Land of acquiescence, land without a life!
Yet the terrain is “not dead but sleeping” and will awaken to determine its
destiny. Honor and courage will lead the fight to freedom, and Ireland will
be transformed into glory rather than persist in misery. The pain that
Ireland has undergone has fortified it, as the country exists “strong and
free again.”
When addressing social justice in either general or specific terms, New
Woman poems decried indignity, inequality and tyranny. For some poets,
the future augured hopeful change, however. Whether the poems helped
create a climate of reform and an improved social system cannot be deter-
mined, but the admonitions and encouragements transmitted crucial
messages.
Chapter Previews
The chapters follow a relatively unusual format in featuring an author
whose oeuvre includes significant works on a particular subject, followed
by pertinent verses by other poets. This pattern provides numerous view-
points on the topic and in so doing reveals various currents of thought
circulating at the fin de siècle. Moreover, many poems that have faded into
oblivion over the generations can move to the foreground, as can their
writers. Consequential work by several of the poets appears in multiple
chapters. In the descriptions below, a sense of important critical inquiries
is included.
The second chapter scrutinizes marriage, an especially important issue
for New Women when cultural practices left many wives feeling trapped
and bereft. Nesbit, who probed unsatisfactory marital conditions in mul-
tiple ways, serves as the main poet in this discussion. The selected verses
address three areas of special concern, which often intersect: constraint,
estrangement, and infidelity. The remainder of the chapter analyzes poems
by Nora Hopper, Radford, Amy Levy, and Sigerson, which were chosen
because of their astute assessments of the flawed state of Victorian mar-
riage. Key questions: how disturbing are marital conditions in the fin de
siècle? What factors lead to miserable marriages?
The varied permutations of desire emerge in the third chapter, reflect-
ing the heightened awareness and exploration of sexuality in the late cen-
tury. The poetry of Olive Custance dominates the chapter and offers a
broad spectrum of erotic interests in both heterosexual and same-sex con-
figurations. Custance’s own bisexual history provides an intriguing contri-
bution to the study of her work. Completing the chapter are investigations
of poems by Levy, Alice Meynell, Radford, Field, Mary C. Gillington, and
sister Alice E. Gillington. These verses present compelling techniques—
the workings of dreams, a Sapphic connection, and sea imagery—for artic-
ulating the controversial and sensitive issue of desire. Key questions: how
can desire by conveyed both to conservative and sexually aware Victorian
readers? How can female desire be made ambiguous or indecipherable to
individuals who would find it distasteful?
The emphasis shifts in Chap. 4, which details the misery and apathy
that destitution engenders. Southern’s sonnets provide the main subject
and call for greater compassion and attentiveness to this widespread prob-
lem. Rarely discussed in critical commentary, Southern’s work provides
perceptive analyses about the causes and ramifications of poverty. The
34 P. MURPHY
chapter proceeds to examine verses by Radford, Nesbit, Annie Matheson,

Kendall, Bevington, and Coleridge, whose works assess both secular and
ecclesiastical responses to indigence. Key questions: how can the sonnet
project an unconventional voice and uncomfortable sentiments in
Southern’s oeuvre? How can other poetic forms be appropriated to cap-
ture the straits of the impoverished?
The sufferings of a specific group, “fallen women,” are targeted in the
next chapter. Blind’s poems form the core of the chapter, and they describe
the painful and often fatal results when inexperienced girls and young
women, particularly of the lower classes, are seduced and left to fend for
themselves in a harsh world. Concluding the discussion are verses by Emily
Pfeiffer, Robinson, Levy, and Nesbit, who deftly convey the dire plights of
the fallen woman and the social irresponsibility she encounters. Key ques-
tions: how can poetry influence apathetic or hypocritical Victorians so that
they will become sympathetic to the dismal condition of fallen women?
How can society’s response to fallen women be condemned effectively?
Chapter 6 moves to metapoetic deliberations, with particular focus on
women writers. Robinson’s work presents valuable insights on the poetic
process, touching on such matters as innovative contributions by women,
the challenges of the genre, and the difficulties of uncovering one’s voice.
Other verses by Pfeiffer, Radford, Custance, Gore-Booth, Bevington,
Nesbit, and Coleridge assert the poetic authority of women, convey the
vagaries of inspiration, and ponder poetic responsibility. Key questions:
how can poetry convey a woman’s perspective on the writing process?
How can poetry combat and overcome social illusions of female inferiority?
The final chapter considers London as a desirable environment for New
Women with its many positive attributes. Londoner Levy’s poems portray
the city in its diverse manifestations that hold promise for advanced women
seeking to make their marks as authors. The rest of the chapter covers the
metropolitan poems by Watson, who wrote extensively on the subject and
praised the energy, allure, and beauty of the city. Key questions: how does
the urban environment provide vital benefits for a modern woman? How
does city life outweigh country life?
Perhaps my study will encourage other scholars to turn attention to
these often-obscure poets, which has been a key objective for its creation.
Many other women poets, unknown or barely recognized, deserve to have
their work recovered and discussed. Such efforts can only enhance and
enrich the study of Victorian poetry.
Notes
1. As Sally Ledger remarks, “[T]he figure of the New Woman was utterly
central to the literary culture of the fin-de-siecle years” (The New
Woman, 10).
2. Charles G. Harper, Revolted Woman, 2; Eliza Lynn Linton, “The Wild
Women as Social Insurgents,” 596.
3. Linton, “The Wild Women,” 604.
4. Havelock Ellis, New Spirit, 9; “Character Note: The New Woman,” 366;
Ledger, The New Woman, 9.
5. Nat Arling, “What is the Role of the ‘New Woman?’” 576; M. Eastwood,
“The New Woman in Fiction and in Fact,” 377; A. Amy Bulley, “The
Political Evolution of Women,” 1, 8; H. E. Harvey, “The Voice of Woman,”
196; Herbert Jamieson, “The Modern Woman,” 572.
6. Sarah Grand, “The New Aspect of the Woman Question,” 271.
7. Grand, “The New Aspect,” 272; Ouida, “The New Woman,” 612; Sydney
Grundy, The New Woman, 299, 305, 300.
8. Linton, “The Wild Women,” 605; “Character Note,” 365; “Manly
Women,” 757; “Sex versus Sex,” 58; “The ‘New Woman’ in Her Relation
to the ‘New Man,’” 335.
9. Hugh E. M. Stutfield, “The Psychology of Feminism,” 115; Stutfield,
“Tommyrotics,” 836, 844; James Ashcroft Noble, “The Fiction of
Sexuality,” 490–91; Margaret Oliphant, “The Anti-Marriage League,”
136; Edmund Gosse, “The Decay of Literary Taste,” 118.
10. T. S. Clouston, “Female Education from a Medical Point of View,” 224;
Grant Allen, “Plain Words on the Woman Question,” 453; Karl Pearson,
The Ethic of Freethought, 360, 355; Harper, Revolted Woman, 27.
11. “The Higher Education of Women,” 157, 161; Helen McKerlie, “The
Lower Education of Women,” 119; Hewitt, “‘The New Woman’ in Her
Relation to the ‘New Man,” 337.
12. Pearson, The Ethic of Freethought,” 370; Walter Besant, “Candour in
English Fiction,” 7; Stutfield, “Tommyrotics,” 835, 836; Janet E. Hogarth,
“Literary Degenerates,” 591; Oliphant, “The Anti-Marriage League,” 144.
13. Grand, The Modern Man and Maid, 29; Harvey, “The Voice of Woman,”
193; Julia M. A. Hawksley, “A Young Woman’s Right: Knowledge,” 316;
Arling, “What is the Role of the ‘New Woman?’” 576.
14. Several of the authors interacted at salons, observes Ana I. Parejo Vadillo,
and “[t]he sheer variety and number of salons that emerged during the
1880s and 1890s show their importance at the fin de siècle.” Participants
included Rosamund Marriott Watson, Alice Meynell, A. Mary F. Robinson,
Augusta Webster, Dora Sigerson, Dollie Radford, and Mathilde Blind
(23). Poets “moved freely from one salon to another,” Vadillo remarks
(“New Woman Poets and the Culture of the Salon at the Fin de Siècle,” 31).
36 P. MURPHY
15. The meanings of flowers were a popular topic addressed by writers of the
period. See, for example, The Language of Flowers: A History, by Beverly
Seaton for information on the floral vocabulary.
16. Naden was an ardent advocate of education, which “is given us that we
may think for ourselves, feel for ourselves, act for ourselves; why then
should we not speak for ourselves?” (quoted in Poetry of the 1890s, edited
by R. K. R. Thornton and Marion Thain, 25).
17. As Virginia Blain observes about the stanza, the moon cannot produce its
own illumination and it lacks its own atmosphere, which prevents sound
from traveling and thus precludes the transmission of music. The reference
to “hosts” invokes the underworld and positions the moon as “queen of
the dead” (Victorian Women Poets, 296).
18. As Thornton and Thain’s Poetry of the 1890s comments, “the mirror imag-
ery” adopted by Naden enabled her “to complain about the damaging role
women were expected to adopt in relation to men,” which serves as “a
leitmotif of women’s writing of this period” (26).
19. Bonnie J. Robinson considers “In the Toy Shop” an example of work that
“sought to uplift the gifts of nature overthrown by man, feminine gifts of
will-power, anger, and animation which were deemed ‘unfeminine.’”
Kendall’s poem, “[a]ccepting the equation of ‘little girls’ and ‘dolls, …
nevertheless overturns this equation” (“‘Individable Incorporate’: Poetic
Trends in Women Writers, 1890–1918,” 8).
20. Robinson hosted an especially popular salon with many attendants, com-
ments Vadillo. “Because of Robinson’s fame as a poet, the salon was visited
by eminent women poets, such as Mathilde Blind, Amy Levy, Louise
S. Bevington, Augusta Webster, Emily Pfeiffer,” and others (“New Woman
Poets and the Culture of the Salon at the Fin de Siècle,” 27).
21. James R. Moore, “The Erotics of Evolution: Constance Naden and Hylo-
Idealism,” 248.
22. For information on the nebular theory, see Marilyn Bailey Ogilvie’s
“Robert Chambers and the Nebular Hypothesis.”
23. “Anodos” is a Greek term that carries such meanings as enlightenment, an
ascent, and a wanderer. “Anodos” also was the name of a character appear-
ing in the 1858 Phantastes by George MacDonald.
24. Leeanne Marie Richardson, “Naturally Radical: The Subversive Poetics of
Dollie Radford,” 112. After Radford’s A Light Load was published,
Richardson comments that “Radford’s poetic dreams were deferred, or at
least diverted into another channel. ‘What Song Shall I Sing’ narrates
Radford’s absorption with the duties of motherhood” (“Dollie
Radford,” 195).
25. Mona Caird, The Daughters of Danaus, 341.
CHAPTER 2
The Vagaries of Marriage
The intense conversation about Victorian marriage that marked the fin de
siècle presented the profound, significant, and powerful voices of several
women poets who insightfully explore the dark side of wedded life. In
verse collections that appeared in the century’s final decades, the poets
resolutely addressed controversial marital issues that permeated contem-
poraneous nonfiction and fiction as well in stark terms. The work appeared
at a seminal cultural moment, when marriage became a paramount con-
cern of New Women writers in the late 1880s and 1890s.1 The provocative
poetry made a vital contribution to the societal debate in indicting the
deep-rooted injustices and deleterious effects of the institution, drawing a
compelling picture of the angst experienced by Victorian wives. Several
women poets giving voice to the multiple concerns about marital distress
are analyzed in this chapter, with the prolific E. Nesbit leading the
discussion.2
By this time, marriage laws had undergone changes, with some of the
most egregious limitations discarded. Under the 1882 Married Women’s
Property Act, wives, like single women, gained control over their own
possessions. Four years later, the Married Women Act gave greater access
to means of support for wives who had been deserted. Also in 1886, the
infamous Contagious Diseases Acts, with their grossly inappropriate treat-
ment of women suspected of being prostitutes, were repealed. In 1891,
© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 37

Switzerland AG 2023
P. Murphy, Poetry of the New Woman, Palgrave Studies in
Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-19765-9_2
38 P. MURPHY
the Infant Custody Act expanded mothers’ rights over their children. The
same year, the law that enabled a husband to force an unwilling wife into
conjugal activity was overturned. The cessation of burdensome legalities
improved women’s position, but the emotional and intellectual harm
resulting from the vagaries of Victorian marriage continued its course.
Even though concerns about the marital state had surfaced in the past,
the issue gained dramatic prominence with the 1888 publication of Mona
Caird’s acerbic essay, “Marriage,” which famously drew 27,000 letters.
Among its contentions, the essay decried the influence of “current notions
regarding the proper conduct of married people.”3 Indeed, Caird asserted,
“modern ‘Respectability’ draws its life-blood from the degradation of
womanhood in marriage.” In a model marriage, Caird insisted, a wife has
an “obvious right … to possess herself body and soul, to give or withhold
herself body and soul exactly as she wills.”4
Nesbit’s Critiques
The complex oeuvre that Nesbit produced is an unusually expansive one,
which enables an unflinching exploration of the multifarious facets charac-
terizing female discontent. The chapter concentrates on three crucial
aspects of special interest: constraint, estrangement, and infidelity. Nesbit’s
work strikingly illuminates the Marriage Question in the final decades of
the nineteenth century.
In assailing contemporary marriage and in other respects, Nesbit
seemed an advanced woman of the time. Margaret D. Stetz identifies
Nesbit as a New Woman, “by contemporary definitions of the term,”
whose “work forges links between poetry of the 1880s and 1890s and the
fictional projects of the ‘New Women.’5 Nesbit was a founder of the Fabian
Society, a socialist organization with the objective, she explained, “to
improve the social system—or rather to spread its news as the possible
improvement of the said S.S.” Nesbit also befriended progressive women
in the society—among them Olive Schreiner, Annie Besant, and Eleanor
Marx, biographer Julia Briggs observes. A zealous reader of varied texts,
including John Stuart Mill’s Subjection of Women, Nesbit advised that she
was “doing a good bit of serious reading,” adding that “I seem to want to
read all sorts of things at once.” At the same time, Nesbit bemoaned the
dearth of reading opportunities that allowed women to receive only “a
smattering” of material.6 A 1907 piece claimed that Nesbit proved herself
“very apt at giving voice to many of the indefinite yearnings of
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Title: A little gipsy lass

A story of moorland and wild
Author: Gordon Stables
Illustrator: W. Rainey
Release date: September 29, 2023 [eBook #71755]
Language: English
Original publication: Edinburgh: W. & R. Chambers, Limited, 1907
Credits: Al Haines, Chuck Greif and the Online Distributed

Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK A LITTLE

GIPSY LASS ***
The girl simply lifted the latch and entered without ceremony.
LASS. Page 20.
A Little Gipsy Lass

A STORY OF MOORLAND AND WILD
By
GORDON-STABLES, M.D., C.M., R.N.

Author of
'Peggy M'Queen,' 'The Rover Caravan,' &c.
WITH SIX ILLUSTRATIONS
by
William Rainey
LONDON: 47 Paternoster Row

W. & R. CHAMBERS, LIMITED
EDINBURGH: 47 Paternoster Row
1907
Edinburgh:
Printed by W. & R. Chambers, Limited.
CONTENTS.
CHAPTER PAGE
I. LOTTY LEE 1
II. HOW ANTONY HAPPENED TO BE THERE 11
III. IN GIPSY CAMP AND CARAVAN 18
IV. 'EVER BEEN AN INFANT PRODIGY?' SAID LOTTY 34
V. THE QUEEREST SHOW.—A DAY IN THE WILDS 47
'THERE IS THAT IN YOUR EYE WHICH CRONA
VI. LOVES' 59
VII. POOR ANTONY WAS DROWNING! 69
VIII. THE MYSTERY OF THE MERMAN 79
IX. 'THE NEW JENNY WREN' 90
X. A LETTER AND A PROPOSAL 99
XI. BLOWN OUT TO SEA 111
XII. 'OUT YONDER, ON THE LEE BOW, SIR' 121
XIII. ON BOARD THE 'NOR'LAN' STAR' 132
XIV. A LITTLE STRANGER COMES ON BOARD 142
XV. 'I WANT TO DREAM THAT DREAM AGAIN' 154
XVI. SAFELY BACK TO ENGLAND 163
XVII. LIFE ON THE ROAD IN THE 'GIPSY QUEEN' 172
XVIII. SNOW-BOUND IN A MOUNTAIN-LAND 182
XIX. SPORTING-TIME IN WOODS AND WILDS 193
XX. IN THE DARK O' THE NEAP 204
XXI. THE WRECK OF THE 'CUMBERLAND' 214
XXII. THE AMBITIONS OF CHOPS JUNIOR 226
XXIII. 'WELL, CHOPS, TO RUN AWAY' 236
XXIV. 'I SAVED IT UP FOR A RAINY DAY' 248
XXV. 'WE'VE GOT A LITTLE STOWAWAY HERE, GUARD' 260
XXVI. THAT CROOKED SIXPENCE 272
XXVII. 'GAZE ON THOSE SUMMER WOODS' 283
XXVIII. 'HO, HO, HO! SET HIM UP' 290
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS.
PAGE
The girl simply lifted the latch and entered without ceremony Frontispiece.
Then that huge brown bear began to dance 50
He found himself in the water next moment ... with the Jenny
Wren on her side 71
And they had special tit-bits which they took from her hands 92
Presently the black hull of the bark was looming within fifty
yards over her 129
'Father, father,' she cried, 'I cannot, will not do this' 224
BOOKS FOR GIRLS
By May Baldwin.
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THE SUNSET ROCK 5/-
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DORA: A High School Girl 3/6
With Six Illustrations by Mabel L. Attwell.
THE GIRLS OF ST GABRIEL'S 3/6
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THAT AWFUL LITTLE BROTHER 3/6
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SIBYL; or, Old School Friends 3/6
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W. & R. Chambers, Limited, London and Edinburgh.
A Little Gipsy Lass.

CHAPTER I.
LOTTY LEE.
T HE young man stood on the deserted platform of the small, north-

country station, just where the train had left him, on that bright August
evening. Yonder she was speeding east-wards against the breeze.
Against the breeze, and along towards the cliffs that o'erhung the wild,
wide sea, the end of the last carriage gilded with the rays of the setting sun,
the smoke streaming backwards and losing itself over the brown-green
woods that stretched away and away till lost in a haze at the foot of the
hills.
He hailed a solitary porter.
'This isn't a very inviting station of yours, Tom, is it?'
'An awful good guess at my name, sir,' said the man, saluting.
'Your name is Tom, then?'
'No, sir—George,' he smiled. 'But any name does; and as for the station,
weel, it's good enough in its way. We only tak' up or pit doon by signal. But
you'll be English, sir?'
'That's it, George; that's just it. I'm only English. But, so far, I am in luck;
because I understand your talk, and I thought everybody here ran about raw,
with kilts on and speaking in Scotch.'
'So they do, sir, mostly; but I've been far south myself. No, sir, no left-
luggage room here; but if you're going to the inn I'll carry your
portmanteau, though ye'll no' find much accommodation there for a
gentleman like yourself. Besides, it's the nicht of the fair, and they'll be
dancin' and singin' in the road till midnicht.'
'But,' said the stranger, 'I'm bound for Loggiemouth, if I can only find the
way. I'm going to a gipsy encampment there—Nat Lee's or Biffins'. You
know Nat Lee?'
'Well, and curly-headed Lotty too. But, man, you'll have ill findin' your
road over the moor the nicht. It's three good Scotch miles, and your
portmanteau's no' a small weight—a hundred and twenty pounds if an
ounce.'
This young man, with the sunny hair, square shoulders, and bravely
chiselled English face, seized the bag with his left hand and held it high
above his head, much to the admiration of the honest porter.
'You're a fine lad, sir,' said the latter. 'An English athlete, no doubt. Weel,
we all love strength hereabouts, and Loggiemouth itself can boast of bonny
men.'
'Here!' cried the stranger abruptly, as he looked to the west and the sun
that was sinking like a great blood-orange in the purple mist of the
woodlands, 'take that portmanteau, George, in your own charge. I suppose
you live somewhere?'
'I'll lock it up in the lamp-room, sir. It'll be safe enough there.'
'Well, thanks; and to-morrow I'll either stride over for it myself or send
some one. Now, you'll direct me to the camp, won't you?'
'Ay, ay, sir, and you've a good stick and a stout heart, so nothing can
come o'er ye. But what way did nobody meet you, sir?'
'Nat Lee said he would send some one, but—hallo! who is this?'
She ran along the platform hurriedly but smiling—a little nervously
perhaps, blinking somewhat moreover, for the sun's last beams lit up her
face and eke her yellow hair. Her colour seemed to rise as she advanced.
Blushing? No. Lotty Lee was barely twelve.
'Oh, please, sir, are you Mr Blake?'
'I am. And you?'
'Me? I'm only Lotty Lee, and that's nobody. But father sent me to meet
you, and lead you home to our pitch across the Whinny Moor. You couldn't
find the way by yourself, never, never, never!'
'Good-night, sir.—Good-night, Miss Lotty,' cried the porter, throwing the
portmanteau on his shoulder and marching off with it.
'Well,' said the young fellow, 'I have a sweet little guide anyhow; but are
you sure that even you can find the way yourself, Lotty?'
'Oh yes, Mr Blake, please.'
Hers was a light, musical, almost bird-like laugh.
She tossed back her head a little, and all those impossible little crumply
curls caught by the evening breeze went dancing round her brow and ears.
'If you have any—any big thing, I will carry it for you, sir.'
It was his turn to laugh now. 'Why, Lotty,' he said, 'I shouldn't wonder if
I had to carry you before we get to camp.'
'Come,' she answered, with an uneasy glance at the west. She took his
hand as if he'd been a blind man. 'Father said I was to lead you, sir.'
'But I don't think he meant it in so literal a sense, Lotty. I think I can see
for quite half an hour yet.'
He kept that warm hand in his, nevertheless. So on they went, chatting
together gaily enough now, for she did not seem a bit afraid of her tall
companion.
'I would have been here much sooner, you know, but Wallace followed
me. Wallace is a very naughty boy sometimes, and father doesn't like him to
be out of camp at nights.'
'And where is the young gentleman now?'
'Oh, I had to take him back, and that is what kept me.'
It was getting early dark to-night, and one great star was already out in
the east. Whinny Moor was beginning to look eerisome enough. The
patches of furze that everywhere hugged the ground were like moving
shapes of strange and uncanny antediluvian monsters, and here and there
stood up the dark spectre of a stunted hawthorn-tree waving black arms in
the wind as if to forbid their approach.
Sometimes they had to creep quite sideways through the bushes of
sturdy whins and bramble; sometimes the moor was more open, and here
and there were little lakes or sedgy ponds of silver sheen, where black
things swam or glided in and out among the rustling rushes. Flitter-mice
darted over their heads or even between them, and from the forest now and
then came the doleful cry of the great barn-owl.
'On the whole,' said young Blake, 'I'm glad you came, Lotty. I doubt if
ever I could have made my way across this moor.'
'Nor through the forest yonder. Ah! the forest is much worse, Mr Blake.'
'Dark and dismal, I suppose?'
'It is dark; I don't know about dismal, Mr Blake. But I know all the road
through this moor; because when things come to the station father often
sends me for them.'
'At night?'
'Oh yes, often at night. Only, there is a little winding path through among
the pine-trees, and one day Chops went in daylight and marked all the trees
in white paint for me. But father thrashed him for it, because white paint is
one of the show properties, and we mustn't waste the properties. But I cried
for Chops.'
'And who is Chops, Lotty?'
'Oh, Chops is the fat boy; he is a property himself, but nobody could
waste him.'
'No?'
'No; and Chops is fifteen, you know, and so good and so fond of me; but
he is so fat that he can't look at you, only just blinks over his cheeks. But
Chops is so kind to me—quite loves me. And so does Wallace. But I love
Wallace better than anybody else, and everybody else loves Wallace.'
'And Wallace and everybody love Lotty, I'm sure of that.'
'Oh, Wallace loves me, and would die for me any day. But, of course,
everybody doesn't. I'm only just a property, you know.'
'But your father and mother?'
Frank Antony Blake felt the small, soft hand tremble in his.
'There is no mother, sir. Never was a mother in my time. But father'——
The child was crying—yes, and sobbing—as if her heart would break.
Then, though Frank Antony was tall and strong for his eighteen years, he
didn't really know what to do with a girl who burst into tears at night on a
lonesome moor. He could remember no precedent. It mightn't be correct, he
thought, to take her in his arms and kiss her and try to soothe her, so he
merely said, 'Never mind, Lotty; never mind. It is sure to come all right
somehow.'
For the life of him, however, he couldn't have told you what was wrong
or what there was to come right. In the fast-waning light Lotty looked up at
him ever so sadly, and he could not help noticing now what he had not
noticed before—Lotty was really a beautiful child.
'You talked to me so kindly like,' she said, 'and hardly anybody does that,
and—and that was it. Don't talk to me kindly again, sir, ever, ever, ever!'
He patted her hand.
'That's worse,' said Lotty, feeling she wanted to cry again, and she drew
the hand away. 'You'll have me crying again. Speak gruff to me, as others
do, and call me "Lot!"'
But at that moment Antony had a happy inspiration. He remembered that
in his big coat-pocket he had a large box of assorted chocolates, and here
close by on a bare part of the moor was a big white stone.
'Come,' he cried, 'there is no great hurry, and I'm going to have some
chocolates. Won't you, Lot?'
Down he sat on the big white stone, and Lotty stood timidly in front of
him. But Antony would not have this arrangement, so he lifted her bodily
up—'how strong he is!' she thought—and seated her beside him, then threw
a big handful of the delicious sweets into her lap.
She was smiling now. She was happy again. It was not the chocolates
that worked the change; but the chance companionship of this youth of
gentle blood, so high above her, seemed to have wakened a chord long, long
untouched in that little harp of a heart of hers.
Was it but a dream, or had there been once a time, long—ever so long—
ago, when voices quite as pleasant and musical and refined as Antony's
were not strange to her? And had she not, when young—she was twelve
now, and that is so old—lived in a real house, with bright cushions on real
sofas, and lamps and mirrors and flowers everywhere? No, that must have
been a dream; but it was one she often dreamt while she swung by night in
her cot, as the winds rocked the caravan and lulled her to sleep.
The autumn evening was very beautiful now; bright stars were shining
so closely overhead that it seemed as if one could almost touch them with a
fishing-rod. Besides, a big, nearly round moon had managed to scramble up
behind the bank of blue clouds in the east—a big, fat face of a moon that
appeared to be bursting with half-concealed merriment as it blinked across
the moor.
It wasn't the lollies that had enabled Lotty to regain her good spirits; but
she felt quietly happy sitting here on the stone beside this newly found
friend. Oh yes, he was going to be a friend; she felt certain of that already.
Young though Lottie was, she had a woman's instinct. Perhaps she
possessed a woman's pride as well, though only in embryo; for she felt half-
ashamed of her awkward, bare brown legs that ended not in shoes but rough
sandals, and of the pretty necklace of crimson hips and haws that she had
strung for herself only yesterday.
They had been sitting in silence for some time, both thinking, I suppose,
when Lotty's keen ear caught the weary call of some benighted plover.
'They'll soon be away now!' she sighed, more to herself than to her
companion.
'What will soon be away, Lotty?'
'Oh, the plovers and the swallows and the greenfinches, and nearly all
my pretty pets of springtime, and we'll have only just the rooks and the
gulls left.'
Antony laid his hand on hers.
'Lotty loves the wild birds, then?'
'I—I suppose so. Doesn't everybody? I wish I could go south with the
birds in autumn, to lands where the flowers are always blooming.'
'Who knows what is before you, child!'
The child interested him.
'Look, Lotty, look!' cried Antony next moment; 'what on earth can that
be?'
He was genuinely startled. About two hundred yards from the place
where they sat a great ball of crimson-yellow fire, as big as a gipsy pot, rose
slowly, waveringly, into the air. It was followed by five others, each one
smaller than the one above it. They switched themselves towards the forest,
and one by one they went out.
'It is only will-o'-the-wisps,' said Lotty, 'and they always bring good
luck. Aren't you glad?'
'Very,' said Antony.
Then, hand in hand, as if very old acquaintances indeed, they resumed
their journey. And, as they got nearer and nearer to the forest, the tall pine-
trees, with brown, pillar-like limbs, grew higher and higher, and finally
swallowed them up.
CHAPTER II.
HOW ANTONY HAPPENED TO BE THERE.
A NTONY BLAKE—or Frank Antony Blake, to give him the benefit of

his full tally—was the only son and heir-apparent of Squire Blake of
Manby Hall, a fine old mansion away down in Devonshire; thousands
of acres of land—no one seemed to know how many—rolling fields of
meadow-lands divided by hedgerows and waving grain, woods and wolds,
lakes and streams, and an upland of heath and fern that lost itself far away
on the nor'-western horizon.
The mansion itself, situated on a green eminence in the midst of the
well-treed old park, was one of the stately homes of England; and though
antique enough to be almost grim—as if holding in its dark interior the
secrets of a gloomy or mayhap tragic past—it was cheerful enough in
summer or winter; and from its big lodge-gates, all along its gravelled
avenues, the wheel-marks bore evidence that Manby Hall was by no means
deserted nor the squire very much of a recluse.
The gardens of this mansion were large enough to lose one's self in,
silent save for the song of birds, with broad green walks, with bush and tree
and flower, and fountains playing in the centre of ponds only and solely for
the sake of the waterfowl or the gold and silver fish that hid themselves
from the sunshine beneath the green, shimmering leaves of lordly floating
lilies, orange and white.
A rural paradise was Manby Hall. Acres of glass too, a regiment of semi-
silent gardeners, and a mileage of strong old walls around that were gay in
springtime and summer with creeping, climbing, trailing flowers of every
shape and shade.
If there was a single grim room in all this abode it was the library, where
from tawny, leather-bound shelves the mighty tomes of authors long dead
and gone frowned down on one, as one entered through the heavily draped
doorways.
Whisper it! But Antony was really irreverent enough to say one day to a
friend of his that this solemn and classic library was a jolly good billiard-
room spoiled.
Anyhow, it was in this room that Frank Antony found himself one
morning. He had been summoned hither by his father.
The squire was verging on fifty, healthy and hard in face, handsome
rather, with hair fast ripening into gray.
'Ha, Frank, my boy! come forward. You may be seated.'
'Rather stand, dad. Guess it's nothing too pleasant.'
'Well, I sent for you, Frank'——
'And I'm here, dad.'
'Let me see now. You're eighteen, aren't you?'
'I suppose so, sir; but—you ought to know,' replied Antony archly.
'I? What on earth have I to do with it? At least, I am too busy a man to
remember the ages of all my children. Your mother, now, might; but then
your mother is a woman—a woman, Frank.'
'I could have guessed as much, dad. But as for "all" your children, father,
why, there are only Aggie and I. That comprises the whole lot of us; not
very tiresome to count, I reckon.'
'There! don't be quizzical, boy. I sent for you—er—I sent for you to—
to'——
'Yes, father, sent for me to—to'——
'I wish you to choose a career, you young dog. Don't stand there and to—
to at me, else I'll—I don't know what I mightn't do. But stand down, sir—I
mean, sit down—and you won't look so precious like a poacher.'
Antony obeyed.
'You see, lad, I have your interest at my heart. It is all very well being an
athlete. You're a handsome young fellow too—just like me when I was a
young fellow. Might marry into any county family. But cricket and football
and rowing stroke aren't everything, Frank, and it is high time you were
looking ahead—choosing your career. Well, well,' continued the squire
impatiently, 'have you nothing to say?'
'Oh yes,' cried Frank Antony, beaming now. 'I put that filly at a fence to-
day, father, and'——
'Hang the filly! I want you to choose a career; do you hear?'
'Yes, father.'
'Well, I'm here to help you all I can. Let us see! You're well educated; too
much so for the Church, perhaps.'
'Not good enough anyhow, dad, to wear a hassock. Whew! I mean a
cassock.'
'Well, there are the civil and the diplomatic services.'
Antony shook an impatient head.
'And you're too old for the army. But—now listen, Frank. I expect your
eyes to gleam, lad, when I mention the term: a parliamentary career! Think
of it, lad; think of it. Just think of the long vista of splendid possibilities that
these two words can conjure up before a young man with the blood of a
Blake in his veins.'
Frank Antony did not seem at all impressed; not even a little bit.
'I'm afraid, father, I'm a lazy rascal,' he said, almost pitying the
enthusiasm which he himself could not appreciate. 'I'm not so clever as my
dear old dad, and I fear the House would bore me. Never could make a
speech either, so'——
'Speech!' roared the squire, 'why, you'll never be asked to. They wouldn't
let you. They'd cough you down, groan you down, laugh you down.
Besides, clever men don't make speeches nowadays—only the fools.'
Young Antony suppressed a yawn.
'Very good, my boy, very good!'—his dad was shaking hands with him
—'and I honour you for your choice. And I'm of precisely the same opinion.
There's nothing like a seat in the House.'
'Rather have one on the hillside though, daddy, all among the grouse.'
His father didn't hear him.
'And now, Frank, I'm not an ordinary father, you know; and, before
entering the House, I don't see in the least why you shouldn't have your
fling for a year or two. I maintain that all young fellows should have their
fling. A hundred years or so agone I had my fling. Look at me now. Am I
any the worse? Well, I've just put a bit in the bank for you, lad, so go and do
your best.'
Frank was laughing merrily.
He put his hand in what he called his rabbit-pocket and handed out a
book: The Gamekeeper at Home. 'That is my lay, dad,' he said. 'I only want
to potter around and fish and shoot, or hunt in season. Don't like London.
Hate Paris. Not at home in so-called society. I'll just have my fling in my
own humdrum fashion, daddy, thank you all the same. I'll have my fling,
depend upon it.'
The young man was smiling to himself at some recollection.
'What is it, Frank?'
'Only this, dad. The black keeper—Tim, you know—weighs two
hundred and twenty pounds. The other day he was stronger than I. I threw
him last eve—Cumberland. This morning I lifted him with my left and
landed him on the west side of the picket-fence. How's that for a fling,
daddy?'
'Go on, you young rogue. Listen, I hear Aggie calling you!'
'Oh, but you listen to me, father. I really don't see enough life down
here.'
'Well, there's London, my lad. London for life!'
'No, no! For the next few months, with your permission, I'm going to
live a life as free as a swallow's. I'm going on the road in my own house-
upon-wheels. I'll see and mingle with all sorts of society, high and low, rich
and poor. I'll be happy in spirit, healthy in body, and by the time I come
back my mind will be quite a storehouse of knowledge that will better fit
me for Parliament than all the lore in this great library, father.'
'You're going to take up with gipsies, Frank?'
'Be a sort of gip myself, daddy.'
'Bother me, boy, if there isn't something really good in the idea. But how
are you going to set about it? Build a caravan for yourself?'
'Not build one, father. Nat Biffins Lee—a scion of the old, old gipsy Lee,
you know—owns a real white elephant'——
'Bless my soul! is the lad going mad? You don't mean seriously to travel
the country with a real white elephant, eh?'
'You don't understand, daddy. This Nat Lee has a splendid house-upon-
wheels which belonged to the Duchess of X—— She went abroad, and Lee
has bought it. But as it needs three powerful horses to rattle it along, it is
quite a white elephant to Nat. So I'm going up north to Loggiemouth in
Nairnshire, and if I like it I'll buy it. Is it all right?'
'Right as rain in March, boy. Go when you like.'

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Poetry of the New Woman: Public

Concerns, Private Matters Patricia

The Discursive Construction of Blame: The language of

Why Public Space Matters Setha Low

The Empire’s New Clothes: The Myth of the Commonwealth

New Media and the Artaud Effect Jay Murphy

Woman Much Missed: Thomas Hardy, Emma Hardy, and Poetry

International Project Finance: The Public-Private

Public vs. private: the early history of school choice

Public & Private Families. 1st Edition Andrew J.

Poetry of the New

ISSN 2634-6494 ISSN 2634-6508 (electronic)

Cover credit line: whitemay/Getty Images.

As always, I greatly appreciate the encouragement and interest my brother,

1 Introduction: Many Voices, Many Issues 1

2 The Vagaries of Marriage 37

3 The Workings of Desire 71

4 Social Responsibility for the Destitute109

5 Grim Stories of the ‘Fallen Woman’147

7 The Promise of London217

8 Conclusion: Speculating on the Future251

Introduction: Many Voices, Many Issues

Immersed in a tumultuous culture at the fin de siècle, New Woman poets

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 1

Woman poetry as a complementary subgenre has not experienced such

A Sketch of the New Woman

understood by men.” As Sally Ledger observes, caustic remarks about the

female protagonist in The Story of an African Farm, the appellation

decried “all the prating of passion, animalism, ‘the natural workings of

I set a lily long ago;

The burgeoning whiteness of the lily contributes to the aura of innocence,

I had a rose-tree born in May;

The garden’s lily blows once more;

Webster’s “Farewell” presents a searing portrait of a couple irretriev-

Farewell: we two shall still meet day by day,

Farewell: chance travellers, as the path they tread,

Farewell: ever the bitter asphodel

Love is dying. Why then, let it die.

Say “We lose what was never ours,

Ah, my heart, is it true? is it true?

In effect, the speaker is uttering sentiments that her partner would

You missed the beauty of the year,

Our drifted spirits are not free

As in the Webster poems, no satisfactory resolution appears possible, with

Bare as a beggar’s board, the trees

And dead and drowned ‘mid leaves that rot,

A death of a different sort caused by love defines May Probyn’s “Ballade

To-morrow brings plenty as lovesome, maybe—

My logic he sets at defiance,

The realization of her lover’s unfitness frequently leads her to consider

Victorian woman can choose either a rewarding profession or a mate, but

Fair maid, if thine unfettered heart

Although New Woman poems, like the preceding examples, tend to

And is it possible?—and must it be—

The protagonist continues to question the inevitability of death dividing

Shall not my pulses leap if you be near?

I would not be the Moon, the sickly thing,

She hath no air, no radiance of her own,

1 Introduction: Many Voices, Many Issues 1

2 The Vagaries of Marriage 37

3 The Workings of Desire 71

4 Social Responsibility for the Destitute109

5 Grim Stories of the ‘Fallen Woman’147

7 The Promise of London217

8 Conclusion: Speculating on the Future251

As Leeanne Marie Richardson observes, the verse explores a “meta-poetic