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British Women Poets 1660-1800: An Anthology, ed. Joyce Fullard. Troy, New York: Whitson, 1990. Pp. ix + 608. $55.
In 1782, Hannah More felt that women's taste for sentimental fictions had got out of hand; true sensibility should arise from "life's dull duties," not from art or affectation:
'Tis not to mourn because a sparrow dies;
To rave in artificial ecstasies ...
'Tis not because the ready eye o'erflows
At Clementina's or Clarissa's woes.
("Sensibility: A Poetical Epistle"; not in this anthology)
But she immediately apologized in the poem to Richardson for this act of impiety against his novels.
The body of poetry written by eighteenth-century women constitutes a fascinating experiment in the breakdown of boundaries between life and art. Not only does the homely subject matter of many of these poems-dollhouse, laundry, fireplace-suggest an unusual ease of transition between daily life and poem; but also there is often a sense that reading, especially the reading of novels, creates a world of discourse strangely interpenetrated, mingled with the poet's home-world-the fictive plane is coextensive with the domestic. Sometimes the poet takes literature as a deliberate model of life, as when Lady Catherine Rebecca Manners asks her child to read the Iliad in order to learn the bad consequences of "passion's dangerous sway" ("Review of Poetry"); but at other times one has the uncomfortable feeling that the poet finds fictions more vivid than reality-as in Anne Bannerman's "Sonnets From Werter," each of which paraphrases a passage from Goethe's novel.
Any person in any age can feel the artificiality...