Professor Goodwin has been most good to me, tells me what books to read, argues my “modernisms” of thought away as much as he can.

—A. Mary F. Robinson (1879)

The command of words and felicity of phrase are as remarkable as the decorative, yet unconventional, qualities of form and colour, so unusual a merit in the handling of motives chosen from the antique. Throughout, the technique is large and modern.

—Graham R. Tomson's review of Amy Levy's A Minor Poet (1891)

Her verse is … modern, clever.

—Review of Graham R. Tomson's A Summer Night (1891)

… it is for us, England's living and yet unspent poets to make all things new. We are for the morning – the nineteenth century thinks it has no poets – nothing to lose – verily it has nothing: for we are not of it – we shake the dust of our feet from it, and pass on into the twentieth century.

—Michael Field, Journal (1892)

I don't know what I am or what I shall become. The Modern.

—Michael Field, Journal (1894)

In 1875, the young poet Alice Thompson (soon to be Alice Meynell) published Preludes (1875), a slender volume of lyrics illustrated by her sister, Elizabeth. Given the professional musical training of the Thompson women, the title of the volume may recall Chopin's musical Preludes (1838), those brief lyrical pieces composed when Chopin was twenty-seven that cover all twenty-four musical keys and demonstrate, as one critic has put it, an “astonishing variety and vividness of mood…achieve[d] in little more than a blink of an eye” (Siepman 5). Meynell's Preludes, written in her mid-twenties and published when she, too, was twenty-seven, may similarly have aimed at variety and vividness of mood, achieved within the brief compass of lyric verse; this sense of the title certainly fits with a wide range of subjects, meters, and stanzaic forms in the volume. Yet whether or not the title embeds a musical allusion, Preludes suggests, more fundamentally, a first volume of poetry, a volume anticipatory of a later, larger poetic achievement and perhaps also of a new direction in lyric verse.

Scholars of nineteenth-century women's poetry often recount that the sentimental piety – indeed, the quasi-religiosity – of the Victorian “poetess” disappears from women's poetry in the mordant irony of the fin de siècle. Virginia Blain, for instance, has recently identified Mathilde Blind and Constance Naden as representatives of “the new breed of post-Darwinian atheists” that comes to replace an earlier, implicitly Christian feminine tradition associated with Elizabeth Barrett Browning (Blain 332). On a related note, I have recently proposed that George Eliot's Legend of Jubal collections (1874, 1878) present a rather late instance of this poetess tradition (LaPorte 159–61). In what follows, I would like to argue that fin-de-siècle iconoclasts such as Blind and Naden actually work hard to reclaim and redeem some of the prominent religious elements of the mid-century poetess tradition, and that Eliot's unusual combination of sentimental piety and religious skepticism gives them a particularly useful model for doing so.

Inspired whilst on holiday in 1893, the poet and literary critic Mathilde Blind speculated on the potential for intimacy in great poetry: “The poet only truly lives when he feels the rapture of communion; when his soul mirrored in a sister soul is doubled like the moon glassed in the Lake of Nemi” (Commonplace book 36; hereafter CB). Blind here alludes to the belief that from the shores of Lake Nemi, located just southeast of Rome, one might witness a perfect reflection of the moon upon the lake's still waters. Like the moon that casts its light down on the lake, Blind imagines the poet radiating outward toward her readers and experiencing with them “the rapture of communion,” a flash of sympathetic confederacy. It was an ideal Blind had considered from her first volume of poetry in 1867 to her recently published Dramas in Miniature (1891), and it had determined most notably The Ascent of Man, Blind's 1889 poetic re-writing of Darwinian evolution. In her work as a literary critic as well as in her poetry, Blind singles out moments of passionate communication, such as lines of D. G. Rossetti that “set[] ones nerve tingling” (Correspondence; letter to Richard Garnett, 10 October 1881), and Shelley's poetry, which is like an “electric telegraph of thought flashing its fiery spark through the dull dense world of sense” (“Shelley” 97). At its best, poetry fuses an “intensity of feeling, [a] depth of thought, music, and form” (Correspondence; letter to Richard Garnett, 26 January 1870) so as to resonate most effectively with what Tennyson called “the deep heart of every living thing” (Poems 1: 85).

The work of Amy Levy, as a Jewish, feminist, lesbian writer at the fin de siècle, coincides with what Sally Ledger and Roger Luckhurst describe as a “crucial moment in the formation and transformation of [the] object[s] of study” of “cultural and social historians, urban theorists, literary critics, post-colonial critics, feminist writers, and gay and lesbian theorists” (xiv). The concern of this article, rather than co-opting Levy into a particular critical framework, is to explore her presentation of subjectivity in the urban landscape, particularly in the poems of the posthumously published A London Plane-Tree and Other Verse (1889). In these poems and elsewhere the city instigates a disturbing unsettling of binaries and identifications which suggests the possibility of writing (of) divergent or subversive identities, what Cynthia Scheinberg terms Levy's “minority” voices (Women's Poetry 191). The irregular, unregulated urban space undermines the closure of heterosexual, national narratives and provides a cartography for Levy's exploration of “the intersection between various minority positions and cultural discourses which construct and judge ‘others’” (ibid.). In the first two sections of A London Plane-Tree Levy moves towards a complex elaboration of impermanently located self-knowledge that develops beyond the sexual and racial identifications of her earlier work in which she draws on more traditional and intelligible knowledges. Thus, the biblical and classical themes of “Xantippe” or “Magdalen” and the stable persona of the dramatic monologue are increasingly replaced by a lyric voice that occupies an unstable, modern, urban world. With her interest in the poet James Thomson (B. V.) and her 1883 essay on him, Levy can be seen to be identifying with an emergent late-nineteenth-century urban poetic that greatly influences the first section of A London Plane-Tree. But it is not simply that Levy “discloses how the metropolitan world of high culture was increasingly infiltrated by…feminists, sexual dissidents, Jewish people, and freethinkers” (Bristow 80). The city of A London Plane-Tree and the intersections, interchanges, and subversions it enables make it impossible to maintain the divisions of self and other, object and subject. It is through the space of the city that Levy is enabled to write the specificity of her own unauthorized, ambiguous, “minor” voice.

If New Woman writing embraced everything from political reform, sexual freedoms, and economic and social independence to literary publishing, Lucy Bland and other historians have confirmed that New Woman debates often played out in terms of marriage, whether in Mona Caird's path-breaking 1888 essay on “Marriage” or her by-now familiar novel of 1894, The Daughters of Danaus. This title, taken from the myth of women in Hades condemned to haul water in leaky jars after murdering their husbands on their wedding nights, suggests both the futility of life for middle-class Victorian women and the latent, murderous recoil they could harbor. To fall back upon these two Caird works to exemplify New Woman writing, however, is in some ways to perpetuate a generic oversimplification that New Woman writing was a prose medium.

I got your poems, my dear Dollie. They made me sad. They make me think of the small birds in the twilight, whistling brief little tunes, but so clear, they seem almost like little lights in the twilight, such clear vivid sounds. I do think you make fine, exquisite verse…I hear your voice so plainly in these, so like a bird too, they are, the same detachment.

—D. H. Lawrence to Dollie Radford, January 1916

In the summer of 1895 American critic Edmund Clarence Stedman sent a letter across the Atlantic to Robert Bridges about a second decisive change that had just occurred in the career of one of the English poet's most widely published compatriots: “the Armytage-Tomson-Watson sequence is interesting. Well, a woman who can write such ballads has a right to be her own mistress” (Stedman and Gould 2: 185). Stedman's intriguing comment arose from the succinct biographical entries that he was compiling for A Victorian Anthology, 1837–1895 (1895). Without doubt, Stedman's eagerness to include up-to-date information about numerous poets whose reputations developed in the 1880s and 90s shows an unmatched thoroughness in such anthologies of the day, and the resulting comprehensiveness of his 1895 volume has ensured that it remains an enduringly useful source of reference.

In 1892, Katharine Bradley (1846–1914) and Edith Cooper (1862–1913) published a volume of poetry with the title Sight and Song based on their response to a series of paintings in British and Continental public galleries. Bradley and Cooper, aunt and niece, devoted lovers, who over the three decades of their writing lives produced numerous volumes of poetry and plays collaboratively under the authorial signature “Michael Field,” had already made their name with a volume published in 1889 entitled Long Ago, comprising translations and elaborations of the Sapphic fragments, which has been read as an intriguing and (for the times) audaciously explicit celebration of love between women. The concept of “translation” was as fundamental to the project of Sight and Song as it had been to Long Ago; however, in the later volume it refers not to the literal translation of poetic fragments written in an ancient and other language (as Long Ago ostensibly did) but to the rhetorical act of interpreting visual images. The aim of their new collection of ekphrastic poems was, as they explained in the Preface to Sight and Song, “to translate into verse what the lines and colours of certain chosen pictures sing in themselves” (Michael Field, Sight and Song v). The synaesthetic complexity of Michael Field's language here suggests the multidimensional sensory experience of looking at and responding to visual art works, something the women try to capture in the various kinds of writing they undertake around the production of this volume – their journal and their letters, as well as the poems themselves – in their attempt to provide such a translation. In this essay I should like to explore how Sight and Song continues the project of Long Ago in the sense both of articulating their lesbian experience and of locating them in a cultural tradition, only that experience is here specifically associated with visual hermeneutics and with the circulation of the verbal and the visual, and the cultural connections they make are not with a classical lesbian heritage but with recent and contemporary aestheticians and writers on art – most notably, I suggest, with two other couples who wrote art criticism in collaboration: Bernard Berenson and Mary Costelloe, and Vernon Lee and Clementina (“Kit”) Anstruther-Thomson.

To a far greater degree than many of us have yet realized, late-nineteenth-century women's poetry may be a poetry of alien homelands: of cultural spaces, that is, in which the domestic proves alien, even as technically alien territory comes to represent some form of home. And partly for this reasosn, to explore poetry in English may require moving not only beyond Britain, but also beyond English itself. Think, for example, of Christina Rossetti, who composed poems in Italian; of Mathilde Blind, with her German accent and translation of the French edition of the Journal of Marie Bashkirtseff; of Agnes Mary Frances Robinson Darmesteter Duclaux, whose poetry preceded a long, successful career of writing in great part in and for the French; of Louisa S. Bevington Guggenberger, with her German home and husband; or, for that matter, of nineteenth-century India's first influential English-speaking woman poet, Toru Dutt. As generations of Indian critics have stressed, as early anthologizer E. C. Stedman made clear, and as certain editors of recent nineteenth-century poetry collections have also acknowledged, Dutt's writing played a suggestive role within late-century understandings of “British literature.” Indeed, even now, growing attention to her work is helping extend our conception of the geographical origins of “Victorian” poetry from Britain to Bengal. Still, if we are to develop a full exploration of Dutt's cultural presence, we may need to move further as well, connecting Indo-Anglian literature to that of France.

How to map women's poetry at the end of the nineteenth century was a question already posed by Vita Sackville-West in 1929, in her essay, “The Women Poets of the 'Seventies.” She speculated that the 1870s “perhaps might prove the genesis of the literary woman's emancipation,” as a time of transition when “women with a taste for literature” could follow the lead of Victorian poetesses like Elizabeth Barrett Browning, while also leading women's poetry forward into the future (111). According to Sackville-West, “Mrs. Browning” seemed an exemplary woman of letters to this generation, because “she had been taught Greek; her father had been a man of culture; and she had married a poet” (112). With the formation of women's colleges and the entry of women into higher education, however, another generation of literary women was emerging. What distinguished these new women of letters was a desire for classical education independent of fathers and husbands, demonstrating an independence of mind anxiously parodied by Punch magazine: The woman of the future! she'll be deeply read, that's certain,With all the education gained at Newnham or at Girton;Or if she turns to classic tomes, a literary roamer,She'll give you bits of Horace or sonorous lines from Homer.Oh pedants of these later days, who go on undiscerningTo overload a woman's brains and cram our girls with learning,You'll make a woman half a man, the souls of parents vexing,To find that all the gentle sex this process is unsexing. As quoted by Sackville-West in her essay (114), this parody is an equivocal tribute to the generation of women just before her own. Although (in her estimation) the women poets of the seventies produced “nothing of any remarkable value,” nevertheless she admired their intellectual ambition: “a general sense of women scribbling, scribbling” was the “most encouraging sign of all” that the woman of the future was about to come into being, as an idea to be fulfilled by the New Woman of the fin de siècle (131).

“Oh, it is indeed a burning shame that there would be one law for men and another law for women. I think that there should be no law for anybody” (Beckson, I Can Resist 100). So said Oscar Wilde to a journalist interviewing him in January 1895. And for the first five years of the 1890s, it looked as though the British literary and publishing worlds, at least, were increasingly in accord with this Wildean perspective. Texts challenging the double standard of heterosexual conduct proliferated, even as bold articulations of same-sex desire appeared. At the same time, laws of all sorts that governed the production and consumption of literature seemed to be struck down daily. The three-volume novel declined and, with it, the circulating libraries' law of conforming to Mudie's definition of the reading public's tastes. New Women and other new realists gleefully violated the laws that required fictional narratives to end with marriage or, indeed, to provide some version of closure. In the sphere of periodical publishing, the law demanding that the visual arts be subordinate to words vanished in April 1894 with the first issue of the Yellow Book. The Bodley Head's new quarterly proudly stated that “The pictures will in no case serve as illustrations to the letter-press, but each will stand by itself as an independent contribution” (Stetz and Lasner 8).

Wan mists enwrap the still-born day;

The harebell withers on the heath,

And all the moorland seems to breathe

The hectic beauty of decay.

—Mathilde Blind, “The Evening of the Year,” Songs and Sonnets

To again invoke the organic metaphor at the root of decadence, what is crucial about the notion of decay is not so much the change from a greater to a lesser state, but the changing itself.

—David Weir, Decadence and the Making of Modernism

[T]he aim of decadence, whether in science or art, is to challenge the limits that mark some forms of knowledge as permissible and others as forbidden, regardless of the results.

—Christine Ferguson, “Decadence as Scientific Fulfillment”

Long Ago (1889), Michael Field's inaugural collection of verse, celebrated Sappho, the ancient poetess of Lesbos. The volume proclaimed the diversity of her sexuality; it saluted verse that was connected to the self; and it urged the authenticity of her creative force in ages beyond her death. Taking surviving fragments of Sapphic writing as embarkation points for new poems in her spirit, Michael Field, the joint pseudonym of the two poets Katherine Bradley (1846–1914) and Edith Cooper (1862–1913), hailed the continuing presence of the Greek in the modern age, drawing the reader back to an imagined version of Sappho's mind and experience, her desires and troubles, of which history held so slight a record. Developing ideas articulated by Robert Browning, particularly in the opening book of The Ring and the Book (1868–69), Long Ago discerned in poetry a way of regenerating the energy – or of creating the illusion of such regeneration – of an almost-lost, but indisputably authentic person from the ancient Mediterranean. The volume privileged a post-Romantic assumption about the signal importance of the self behind writing, the complexities and contradictions of which I explore here, and it understood modern poetry's dealings with a nearly vanished Greece as recuperative of a nearly disappeared artist. As such, Long Ago implicitly imagined the work of the contemporary poet as, to use Robert Browning's word, a matter of “galvanism” (Browning I.740): the calling back into the present of the lost forms of distant lives.

poets dare

What the wild eye of fancy sees –

Similitude – the clear, the fair

Light mystery of images

—Alice Meynell, “The Return to Nature”