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

The Women Poets of the 'Seventies 119may be so; his estimate does not alter, but rather increases,the fact that their value is of a pretty low order.As well be frank about it. There is scarcely a voice amongthe whole bevy of them distinguishable from anothervoice. It is not until we come to Alice Meynell's Preludes—and who now thinks of Alice Meynell as a poet of the'seventies?—that we can feel any revival of literary pridein the sex.Indeed one is tempted to ask, as one wades throughIsabella and Menella, whether there was any inherentreason why those women should not have written betterpoetry. I came across a crushing phrase, written by adistinguished man of letters a propos of no less a personthan Christina Rossetti. 'Everywhere else', he says, theexception being Goblin Market,' she is, like most poetesses,purely subjective and in no respect creative'. That, Ithought, was a hard saying; but I wondered how muchtruth there was in it, not as applied to Christina, but tothe women poets as a general principle. These women inthe 'seventies, for instance, with their elegant or devotionalpieces; their wordy and portentous moralising;their dreary narrative poems; their descriptive pieceswhich reminded one of nothing so much as a washy andindifferent water-colour—what was essentially wrongwith them? Was it lack of education? No, for educationnever made a poet. Was it lack of leisure? No, itcertainly was not that. Was it discouragement? No, forby the 'seventies literature was, as I have said, a respectableoccupation for women. One must conclude,quite simply, then, that it was lack of talent? Apparentlyone must. It was of course possible to argue that womenhad only just begun to emerge from the muffled andsubjected state in which nature and men had kept them;but that theory, although consoling, broke down immediatelyas one remembered the earlier women whose