"Telling What's O' Er": Remaking the Sonnet Cycle in Augusta Webster's Mother and Daughter‪.‬

In her 1878 essay "Poets and Personal Pronouns," Augusta Webster proposed that poets adopt a new pronoun: "The use of a little i instead of a big I might have some effect as a sort of modest disclaimer of the writer's personality.' (1) This neologism would allow writers constantly to remind their readers that poetry is not to be taken as autobiographical unless explicitly marked as such by the "big I." Although the essay quickly acknowledges that "the printers would never stand" for this proposal, Webster would soon embark on her own experiment with the authorial 'T' in the unfinished sonnet sequence Mother and Daughter (1895), which takes up the sonnet's familiar preoccupations with love, temporality, death, absence, and language. Recasting these issues in the context of a mother/daughter relationship, the speaker in Webster's sonnets celebrates her relationship with her daughter and mourns its evanescence. Though she employs the conventional capital "I," this speaker not only analyzes her own subjectivity as a mother but also theorizes maternal subjectivity more generally; in doing so, she reimagines the conventions of the sonnet cycle. Webster would probably have availed herself of the "little i" in these sonnets had it been generally recognized as a "modest disclaimer of the writer's personality," but in the absence of such a disclaimer the poems' earliest reader blithely ignored the poet's previously published caveats against conflating speaker and poet. William Michael Rossetti, in his introduction to the posthumous 1895 publication, wrote: "Nothing certainly could be more genuine than these sonnets. A Mother is expressing her love for a Daughter.... The theme is as beautiful and natural a one as any poetess could select." So natural is it, indeed, that "it seems a little surprising that Mrs. Webster had not been forestalled--and to the best of my knowledge she never was forestalled--in such a treatment. But some of the poetesses have not been Mothers." (2) Attributing her choice of theme to her maternity, Rossetti clearly suggests that Webster not only writes from but about her own experience.