What Kind of a Critical Category is "Women's Poetry"‪?‬

When Ana Parejo Vadillo and I decided to organize the 2002 conference "Women's Poetry and the Fin-de-siecle," several of my colleagues asked whether this focus on women's writing was not rather old-fashioned now. For many in Britain "women's writing" is seen to signify purely a feminist political stance in which one argues for the value of women's writing against an assumption that it is forgotten or undervalued. (1) Yet this is not just a category created for a late-twentieth-century political gesture, which can therefore be discarded when that act of recuperation is deemed to be over: it is, as we shall see with particular reference to the work of May Kendall, a category which existed to shape poetic identity and a framework for reading in the later nineteenth century. It is the shifting critical currency of the term "women's poetry," within the field of late-Victorian studies, that I want to explore here. The differences between the conception of "women's poetry" represented at Isobel Armstrong, Virginia Blain, and Laurel Brake's 1995 "Rethinking Women's Poetry: 1730-1930" conference and that apparent at the 2002 "Women's Poetry and the Fin-de-siecle" conference might be a useful starting point. Certainly in 1995 the sense in which "women's poetry" was a recuperative term was still in the air. (2) In contrast, the discourse of the forgotten was hardly in evidence by the 2002 conference. But if the 1995 conference was an important marker of that initial moment of rediscovery, it was also to act as a catalyst for the critical trajectory which we followed thereafter. Armstrong and Blain's book is subtitled Gender and Genre, 1830-1900; the emphasis of the volume is on "the poetic investigation of gender and its interplay with genre" (Preface, p. xiv). Charting the involvement of women's poetry in a wide range of discourses and debates has occupied us since.