R,CHARD MONCKTON MILNES was born in the year - OUDL Home

§6The Women Poets of the 'SeventieswBy V. SACKVILLE-WESTHEN I was first asked to prepare a paper for thisSociety on the women poets of the 'seventies, I acceptedthe invitation with a cheerful rashness. Such feminismas is latent in me—and I suppose a certain degree offeminism must be latent in all women, however reasonable—wasflattered by this assumption that severalwomen, and not Christina Rossetti alone, had been engagedin writing poetry in the 'seventies. That period, soexciting for the free male, so suffocating, so matrimonial,for the still comparatively enslaved female, perhaps mightprove the genesis of the literary woman's emancipationafter all? Women with a taste for literature, I reflected,had already been given a good lead: Jane Austen, theBrontes, and Mrs Browning lay behind them; demure anddeadly, tragic and vehement, delicate and sentimental,they had persevered with their work under conditions ofvarying difficulty. Jane Austen, as we know, had beenobliged to write uncomfortably in a corner of the commonsitting-room at Steventon, with chatter going on all roundher, compelled to keep one eye open in vigilance lest anyoneshould approach to see what she was doing, in whichcase the cover of the blotting-book must hastily be shutdown—scarcely an ideal system for writing a novel; theBrontes, up at Haworth, ill, cold, harassed by poverty,domestic duties, and a half-blind father with a violenttemper, discouraged by publishers, deciding to concealunder ambiguous pseudonyms the horrid truth that they