Florence Boos
Vol. 17, No. 2 (Fall 1998), 325-347

This essay meditates on the politics of an as yet obscure group of poets: Victorian Scottish working-class women. Presenting the work of Elizabeth Campbell, Jane Stevenson, and Mary Macpherson, three women discovered through research in the Glasgow Mitchell Library archives, this paper illustrates their responses to the political and economic oppressions of the Highland Clearances and the industrial revolution. Because these women were so marginalized, their work eludes the middle-class cooptation characteristic of much lower-class Victorian women’s poetry. As a result, their poetry possesses a pristine beauty that mirrors the beauty of the land, the loss and degradation of which they frequently lament. Although for the most part this poetry does not attempt to influence the course of political events, it compellingly portrays the human consequences of policies that profoundly dislocated the Scottish people.

Esther Schor
Vol. 17, No. 2 (Fall 1998), 305-324

This essay documents the ways in which Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s poem Casa Guidi Windows (1851) dramatizes the potential influence of literary models on national politics. Concerned with Italy in the revolutionary years of the late 1840s, Casa Guidi Windows claims that traditional sources of poetic inspiration, such as the legacy of the great poet Dante, contain the means for constructing an enlightened popular consciousness so crucial to nation building. Barrett Browning produces a distinctive poetics of politics that takes shape as a praxis of agency. In this view, the poet and the political revolutionary are both makers rather than the Foucauldian subjects that dominate so much literary criticism. Moreover, the capacity to be a maker defines Barrett Browning’s vision of an enlightened popular consciousness in which all, not just poets, partake of the “divine effluence.”

Ewa Badowska
Vol. 17, No. 2 (Fall 1998), 283-303

This essay argues that Mary Wollstonecraft’s famous A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792) frames feminist concerns in terms of anorexic logic, as Wollstonecraft advances a practice and aesthetic of restraint: she identifies wordiness and excessive use of rhetorical figures with the gluttony characteristic both of men who prey on women and of the women they seduce. Wollstonecraft imagines a new woman who neither eats nor speaks too much and so embodies an impenetrable (to men) integrity and masculine strength. Paradoxically, then, the woman whom Wollstonecraft envisions as carrying the early feminist banner repudiates her body and its needs, yet like an anorexic is intensely preoccupied with its significance.

Clare Brant
Vol. 17, No. 2 (Fall 1998), 269-282

This essay discusses the anonymous 1775 novel, The General Election: A Series of Letters Chiefly Between Two Female Friends, and emphasizes the impact of women’s letters on party politics. Typically, scholars interpret the eighteenth-century epistolary form as emblematizing the female, private sphere of sentiment, but this essay uncovers significant political activism in The General Election’s letter-writing women. Further, it surmises that the gender of the novel’s unknown author is female because the novel so admirably demonstrates the impact of female voices upon the outcome of an important election. Regardless of the accuracy of this hypothesis, this analysis reflects an important trend in women’s political writings: the attempt to integrate female modes, whether genres or social roles, into the political mainstream.

Tamsin Spargo
Vol. 17, No. 2 (Fall 1998), 255-268

This essay explores a series of episodes involving three prominent nonconformists of the 1650s and Restoration—George Fox, Anna Trapnel, and John Bunyan—and considers the ways in which ideas about sexuality factor into the gossip that caused each to be accused of either witchcraft or the shameless seduction of female disciples. Unlike prior scholars who have underplayed the significance of such accusations as the product of hearsay, this essay argues that these rumors importantly underscore the role of excess in nonconformist communities. If critics have long identified excess sexuality with nonconformity as a classic charge of conservative detractors, this paper urges readers to recognize that nonconformists understood excess desire to flow through spiritual communities. Seventeenth-century writings on sacred topics are rarely straightforward theological statements, but engage secular concerns including sexual desire.