Anthology of New Woman Poetry: Insights into Contemporary Issues
By (Author) Patricia Murphy
Anthem Press
Anthem Press
15th October 2025
United Kingdom
Professional and Scholarly
Non Fiction
Poetry anthologies (various poets)
Classic and pre-20th century poetry
Hardback
230
Width 153mm, Height 229mm, Spine 23mm
454g
Women poets of the late Victorian period created much fascinating verse from the standpoint of the independent and advanced New Woman, a profoundly important figure with her iconoclastic perceptions of public and private matters. The New Woman sought to improve women's lives on a variety of fronts, bringing this individual both approbation and disdain. This anthology features a broad range of crucial subjects addressed by these poets, including marriage, motherhood, female desire, and social problems.
Although the iconoclastic New Women have garnered much interest in recent decades, relatively little attention has been devoted to the valuable poetry these authors produced. Many of the New Woman poets are barely known today, if at all, but their writings offer an exceptional lens onto contemporary conditions that provide inestimable value for Victorian studies. Although much of the work has languished in obscurity, this expansive anthology brings the fascinating poetry to the fore.
This volume provides an invaluable aid by uncovering poetry that has been long neglected or infrequently explored. Several of the poets developed extensive oeuvres investigating matters of special interest at the fin de sicle. It is not an easy task in the twenty-first century to identify, obtain, and review the nineteenth-century books containing these poems. This anthology provides a ready resource to access the poetry, which has had limited exposure in other modern collections.
Patricia Murphy is Professor Emerita in English at Missouri Southern State University. She has written extensively on Victorian literature.