Recent scholarship on eighteenth-century women's poetry

Abstract

The eighteenth century was a period of vital importance for the development of women's poetry: with each passing decade, more women began to read and write verse in every available genre and form. Since the late 1980s, this poetry has become increasingly accessible, and individual women poets have been thoroughly integrated into academic research and teaching. This essay provides an overview of recent scholarship on eighteenth-century women's poetry. It begins by outlining broad trends in women's literary history which have shaped the field, before highlighting the unique challenges that women's poetry presents. It then offers a more focused survey of recently published scholarship, with an emphasis on the last 2 decades. Emerging research themes span from the growth in book history and manuscript investigations, to the resurgence of formalist interpretation. Studies of women's poetry have allowed scholars not only to reassess women's contributions to eighteenth-century literary history, but to reconsider the very nature of that history—by re-envisioning how and why poetry was written, innovated, circulated, published, read, and valued within the period. The essay concludes by proposing future directions for the field, including the need for continued recovery work, more critical editions and monograph studies, new methodologies, cross-period dialogues with scholars of early modern and Romantic women's poetry, and practical initiatives to support precarious early career researchers.