‘Life built herself a myriad forms’: epics of gestation and co-operation in late nineteenth-century women’s poetry

ABSTRACT This article argues for a specifically female appropriation and reshaping of the epic tradition in the wake of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species. Based on an analysis of Mathilde Blind’s The Ascent of Man and Louisa Sarah Bevington’s ‘Unto this Present’, it will show how this ‘female evolutionary epic’ responds to and counteracts Social Darwinist narratives of competition and struggle by emphasizing forces of (maternal) gestation, co-operation and sympathy in the development of life on earth. In doing so, these poems anticipate Peter Kropotkin’s notion of ‘mutual aid’ as the primary factor in evolution.