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)

Of all the devices of our complex and complete civilization, I think this huge circulating library system one of the most convenient and agreeable;…to have…volumes of excellent literature for one's exclusive use, seems to me a real privilege, and capital return for one's money.

—Frances Ann Kemble, Further Records 1848–1883

AT AGE FIFTY-TWO, THOMAS HARDY was beginning to feel uneasy about aging. On October 11, 1892, he wrote to his friend Arthur Blomfield: “Hurt my tooth at breakfast-time. I look in the glass. Am conscious of the humiliating sorriness of my earthly tabernacle…. Why should a man's mind have been thrown into such close, sad, sensational, inexplicable relations with such a precarious object as his own body!” (F. Hardy 13–14). This moment of specular disgust was ultimately recorded in a poem: I look into my glass,And view my wasting skin,And say, “Would God it came to passMy heart had shrunk as thin!”For then, I, undistrestBy hearts grown cold to me,Could lonely wait my endless restWith equanimity.But Time, to make me grieve,Part steals, lets part abide;And shakes this fragile frame at eveWith throbbings of noontide. (T. Hardy, Complete Poems 81)

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.

… the arrival of the ale made an agreeable diversion; for Adam had to give his opinion of the new tap, which could not be otherwise than complimentary to Mrs Poyser; and then followed a discussion on the secrets of good brewing, the folly of stinginess in ‘hopping,’ and the doubtful economy of a farmer's making his own malt. Mrs Poyser had so many opportunities of expressing herself with weight on these subjects, that by the time supper was ended, the ale mug refilled, and Mr Poyser's pipe alight, she was once more in high good-humour, and ready, at Adam's request, to fetch the broken spinning-wheel for his inspection.

—George Eliot, Adam Bede

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).

ON 23 DECEMBER 1858, the Times reported the proceedings of the trial in Reading of Mary Newell, a servant, for the willful murder of her three-month-old child, whose body had been discovered in the Thames by boys who had gone fishing. Since Newell herself had admitted the crime in a statement to the constables who came to her mother's house to arrest her, the focus of the trial was not so much on establishing the guilt or innocence of the prisoner as it was on determining what could have motivated such an extreme and seemingly unnatural act of violence in order to decide the severity of her punishment. According to the testimony of a fellow inmate in the workhouse where she lived, Newell had been “a kind and affectionate mother” to the infant and had “suckled it to the last”; the prisoner's defense counsel, seeking to reconcile this description with the seriousness of her crime, invited the medical witness to affirm that she might have been “seized by a destructive impulse” that made her “destroy [that] to which [she] was most fondly attached.” While Newell's defense hoped to establish mental instability as the likeliest conceivable explanation for her act, the prisoner's confession to the constables, describing her hopelessness on being turned away by the child's father, pointed to another motivation, that of economic desperation: “I went to the father of it, and he refused to give me anything, and I told him I would swear the baby, or have a summons for him. He said I might do so. He put on his coat and left me in the shop…. I stood there till his sister put up the shutters. She said it was no use to stop any longer, he would not be home till 11 or 12. I walked the town till 12, being destitute of a farthing. I walked down the Forbury to the King's Meadow. I undressed the baby and laid it by the side on the bank, and let the baby roll in. Afterwards I walked up and down to see if I could see him come indoors. After that I went and got over into a field, and sat under a hedge–it was in a turnip field–till morning…. I saw him at Christmas and he said he would pay for the child.” (“Criminal Courts” 23 Dec. 1858)

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.

IN AUTUMN OF 1854, Mary Jane Grant Seacole traveled to England from Jamaica and “laid…pertinacious siege” to the official and private residences of Sidney Herbert, Secretary-at-War, hoping to secure a post as hospital nurse in the Crimea. Thwarted in her attempts to see the Secretary, Seacole applied to his wife, Elizabeth Herbert, who informed her “that the full complement of nurses had been secured” (Seacole 78, 79). Seacole made one last effort, meeting this time “with one of Miss Nightingale's companions”; this woman, she reports, “gave me the same reply [as Mrs. Herbert], and I read in her face the fact, that had there been a vacancy, I should not have been chosen to fill it” (79). These interlocutors rejected her, Seacole implies, on account of her colored skin (her mother was Jamaican, her father Scottish), but English prejudice did not keep the “doctress” (as she termed herself) from the front.

AT A CRITICAL JUNCTURE in part one of Harriet Martineau's Berkeley the Banker, the fourteenth novel in her Illustrations of Political Economy series, there is a run on a country bank. The run is precipitated by a casual exchange in a local shop during which Mrs. Millar, the confectioner, is given a five-pound note to change. Her reply “Oh, I cant change that note [sic]” is misunderstood by others in the shop to mean that she is refusing to honor a particular bank's note while, in fact, she is simply not able to make change (169). The panic that ensues ruins Mr. Berkeley, the country bank's proprietor, and serves the novel's aim of demonstrating the precariousness of paper currency unbacked by the gold standard. In describing this incident, as well as through various characters' periodic lectures, the novel argues that only a gold standard could have prevented a calamity such as the bank run. Under a gold standard, citizens of the town of Haleham never could have misinterpreted Mrs. Millar's remarks–they would have known that the note must be honored and that, therefore, the confectioner merely lacked the correct change. Under a gold standard, in other words, the meaning of paper currency is not open to misinterpretation; its value is fully known and stable. Martineau may be convinced of the gold standard's ability to scuttle the dangers of textual ambiguity, but this moment also exposes the challenge of regulating the circulation and proliferation of meaning. The meaning of a speech act and the value of a banknote are both revealed as unstable and difficult, perhaps impossible, to regulate or manage.

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 MELODRAMATIC FINAL MOMENTS of Charles Dickens's Oliver Twist, Bumble the ex-beadle is exposed for helping to obliterate Oliver's patrimony. When he attempts to shift the blame for his unlawful actions onto Mrs. Bumble, Mr. Brownlow will not allow such a move because, as Brownlow declares, “‘in the eye of the law’” the husband is the “‘more guilty of the two…for the law supposes that [his] wife acts under [his] direction’” (335; ch. 51). While a model of oppressive officialdom and petty tyranny in his public life, Bumble is no match for the termagant he has married; and the revelation of his private humiliation leads him to reply: “‘If that's the eye of the law, the law's a bachelor’” (335; ch. 51). It is easy to dismiss Bumble's assertion that the “law's a bachelor” as an instance of Dickensian wit, but this essay contends that Oliver Twist is a serious exploration of the “bachelor law.” Specifically, it explores one aspect of the New Poor Laws that did favor Britain's bachelors– the bastardy clause.

In voices, time and accident may occasion great alteration.

—Charles Burney, The Present State of Music in France and Italy

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.

LOOKING BACK to an earlier moment in its own cultural history, no Victorian novel works harder than Middlemarch at the integration of art and life, in terms of both the issues it addresses and its method of composition. Central to this effort is the art-related sequence (chapters 19–21) in which Will Ladislaw encounters the newly married Casaubons on their honeymoon in Rome. In the Belvedere Gallery of the Vatican with a painter friend, Will discovers Dorothea standing lost in thought near a famous Hellenistic sculpture of a sleeping, bare-breasted woman. Struck by the congruity of poses in two such different figures, Will's friend Naumann is on fire to paint Dorothea, and a few days later, rather in spite of himself, Will brings the Casaubons to Naumann's studio. Here, in one of the most broadly comic scenes in the novel, the painter persuades Casaubon to pose as Thomas Aquinas for a historical portrait, slyly securing his sketch of Dorothea during breaks in the sitting. Throughout the sequence, Will engages in aesthetic discourse first with Naumann, then with Dorothea, introducing her to the hugeness of art and, incidentally, to the smallness of her husband.

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.

In short, this [the exchange of gifts] represents an intermingling. Souls are mixed with things; things with souls. Lives are mingled together, and this is how, among persons and things so intermingled, each emerges from their own sphere and mixes together. This is precisely what contract and exchange are.

—Marcel Mauss, The Gift