What would the 18th-century poetic canon look like if women were included? Imagine women poets being venerated alongside Alexander Pope, who held that 'Most Women have no Characters at all,' or Jonathan Swift, who, at the conclusion of that catalogue of excremental horrors 'The Lady's Dressing Room', has his speaker remark: 'Should I the Queen of Love refuse,/Because she rose from stinking Ooze?' Or even Samuel Johnson. If women's writing were taken into account, would it change the way we read and judge the poetry of an era long assumed to be magisterially Augustan and masculine? In her passionate and wide-ranging study of 18th-century women's poetry, Paula Backscheider quotes Isobel Armstrong's framing of such questions in a suggestively entitled essay, 'The Gush of the Feminine' (1995):

We have had two hundred years to discover a discourse of and strategies for reading male poets. They belong to a debate, a dialectic; we know how to think about politics, epistemology, power and language, in productive ways that . . . make these poets mean for us. A hermeneutics has evolved. Not so with the female poets. We are discovering who they are, but there are few ways of talking about them.

LRB 21 September 2006 | PDF Download