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

116 V. Sackville-Westproperty, instead of yielding it up ipso facto to theirhusbands, and women beginning to think they caninterfere with the vote and the British Constitution, andMiss Charlotte Bronte having years ago induced theseventh publisher to accept the manuscript of The Professor,and Miss Barrett having run away years ago withMr Browning, and Mrs Emily Pfeiffer writingPeace to the odalisque, whose morning gloryIs vanishing, to live alone in story;Firm in her place, a dull-robed figure standsWith wistful eyes, and earnest, grappling hands,—Oh woman! sacrifice may still be thine,More fruitful than the souls ye did resignTo sated masters; from your lives so real,Will shape itself a pure and high idealThat ye will seek with sad, wide-open eyes...all this, and what are the women poets doing about it?The answer is: Nothing at all. Poets are usually supposedto be in advance of their time; and women,especially, are supposed to travel by short cuts; but if theevidence of the women poets of the eighteen-seventies isto be believed, neither of these two platitudes has a grainof truth in it. Truth compels me to confess that the womenpoets of the eighteen-seventies, though numerous andprolific, are exceedingly dull. This was the conclusion atwhich I arrived after reading a large number of volumes.I may say that I read very little criticism, contemporaryor otherwise; I read the authors themselves; I wanted todrink of the stream at its source. I read, in the hopes ofmaking a discovery. But the only discovery I made,frankly—which was Mary Coleridge—I couldn't fit intoour date. So how am I to go on, having made this confession?and what am I to say to you? You will complainthat you have been brought here under false pretences;and unless I allow myself to be pushed back on toChristina Rossetti, who is too great and too famous to