Victorian Women’s Poetry and the Science of Society

This book recognises women poets as incisive participants in nineteenth-century socio-literary history. It shows that women, including women poets, contributed to the conceptual integration and eventual professionalisation of literature and sociology from the beginning. Presenting fresh readings of poetry by Elizabeth Barrett Browning, George Eliot, Harriet Martineau and Augusta Webster, the book combines qualitative and quantitative analysis of the sociological factors contributing to women poets’ exclusion during the initial period of literary cannon formation. It also accounts for women poets’ subsequent exclusion from socio-literary history by re-examining the process of literary canonisation that was catalysed by elementary education reform and sociologically warranted educational theory in the final decades of the century.