Forgotten Women

Try to conjure up an image of the Romantic poets, poetry’s answer to the new wave movement. A picture of William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge – strolling across rugged moors, discussing philosophy and language – unavoidably springs to mind. And yet, the image is incomplete, it’s been doctored; one of the principal players remains off stage.

Seen by offbeat critics as an excessively emotional – and possibly even incestuous – sister, Dorothy Wordsworth is best described as William’s creative counterpart. Her Grasmere journals provide a vital underpinning to the events surrounding the Romantics; William relied heavily on her constant support and sharp eye for description (some argue that he ‘borrowed’ descriptions of nature from her work). She frequently accompanied the two poets on their numerous ramblings, but Dorothy, like so many others, has been relegated to a mere footnote in her brother’s literary career.

Literary tradition comes in many different guises: it’s an age-old adage that an author’s fame will increase tenfold after death; writers have a tendency for brooding melancholy à la Hemingway and Poe; and, perhaps most oddly of all, the writing of sisters, wives and daughters of male luminaries often goes unread and unacknowledged, until chance rediscovery and celebration many years after their death. The Orwellesque erasure of Dorothy Wordsworth is not an exception, but a single case in a list full of female writers whose work has been lost and forgotten.

Eleanor Marx. Sara Coleridge. Christina Rossetti. Elizabeth Barrett Browning. Sylvia Plath. Why were all these women buried by the surge of history? Clearly, the expectation of women to marry, reproduce, and primly homemake feeds into the amnesia of literary critics across the centuries. Cultural and intellectual pursuits have traditionally been confined to men, while women have often been relegated to the child-rearing domestic sphere. As Jane Austen describes in Persuasion, ‘I hate to hear you talk about all women as if they were fine ladies instead of rational creatures. None of us want to be in calm waters all our lives.’ These ‘calm waters’ of corseted silence led many to think that women simply couldn’t create works of literature worthy of acclaim.

‘Again and again, the successes of women have been diminished by those of their male relations’

Sylvia Plath spent most of her life in the towering shadow of her poet laureate husband, Ted Hughes, but a posthumous Pulitzer Prize win has brought her fame at Hughes’ expense. She is now credited with a shift to confessional poetry, although her work is still looked at through the lens of a tyrannical husband. A century earlier, Ada Lovelace was engaged in writing of an altogether different sort, the small matter of code for the first computer algorithm. Lovelace is now held up as a leading figure for women in science and girl geeks everywhere, but after death, her achievements were quickly smothered by her father Lord Byron’s poetic career and dodgy reputation for debauchery. The pattern is easy to trace; again and again, the successes of women have been diminished by those of their male relations, whether fathers, sons or husbands.

Though the social position of women through the ages explains some part of their neglect, it doesn’t completely resolve this cultural bypass. There are female writers who gained renown on their own terms in a completely masculine world. While her brother Dante was busy painting the Virgin Mary and imagined angelic lovers, Christina Rossetti was writing verses about fallen women, lesbians and those put in a metaphorical straitjacket by the constraints of Victorian England. In the masculine domain of artistic genius, the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, Christina forged a path for herself; her poem Goblin Market glided into the pop culture vein. Rossetti’s poetry shrewdly combines the religious fervour of the time with hidden references and symbols of female agency. In Goblin Market she concocts the story of sisters Laura and Lizzie and their frenzied taste of the ‘forbidden fruit.’ Feminine solidarity is at the core of the poem and prevents Laura’s untimely death: ‘For there is no friend like a sister… To cheer one on the tedious way, To fetch one if one goes astray, To lift one if one totters down, To strengthen whilst one stands.’

Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s popularity managed to surpass even Christina Rossetti. Her work was widely read in Britain and the US, and the critical reception was likewise exalting; writers across the Atlantic dubbed her as a poet of the highest order. But, to continue a cloying theme, it’s her husband, poet Robert Browning, whose work has made it onto school syllabuses, while Elizabeth’s poetry has slipped, Josh Hartnett-like, from public memory.

There are those who see the idea of literary history being deliberately recorded in a very selective way as something only a David Icke would think. However, Browning and Rossetti show that it’s not just women in general whose talent remained under the radar, but that women who enjoyed great acclaim and celebrity were also afforded a fate similar to the lost city of Z. The slump in the careers of these female writers is too identikit to be a simple coincidence. The phrase ‘History is written by the victors’ is often used as a trite soundbite, but, in this case, it couldn’t be more apt. It took a raft of determined feminist academics and readers to uncover the forgotten poets, playwrights and novelists after years spent in the shade.

Of course, there is a strange enigma about how literature is passed down and how it relates to future generations. There has been much debate about why Shakespeare’s plays have been treading the boards since their first production and been reinvented in myriad ways. A cocktail of unknowable forces makes a piece of literature linger in the ether; the problem with the erasure of female writers in favour of their male counterparts is that it’s traceable, knowable and deeply predictable. We are constantly told that there are no women to put on bank notes, build statues of or hold up as national figureheads, but if you simply take the time to look, you’ll see they are all around us.

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Rachel Holmes on Eleanor Marx, The Portico Library, 10 Dec, 7pm.

Holmes will be in conversation with Anita Sethi, manchesterliteraturefestival.co.uk