The Poetical Works Of Milman Bowles Wilson And Barry Cornwall

First published in 1998, this volume follows the life and work of Adelaide Procter (1825-1864), one of the most important 19th-century women poets to be reassessed by literary critics in recent years. She was a significant figure in the Victorian literary landscape. A poet (who outsold most writers bar Tennyson), a philanthropist and Roman Catholic convert, Procter committed herself to the cause of single, fallen and homeless women. She was a key member of the Langham Place Circle of campaigning women and worked tirelessly for the society for Promoting the Employment of Women. Many of her poems are concerned with anonymous and displaced women who struggle to secure an identity and place in the world. She also writes boldly and unconventionally of women’s sexual desires. Loved and admired by her father the poet Bryan Procter, her editor Charles Dickens and her friend W.M. Thackeray, Procter wrote from the heart of London literary circles. From this position she mounted a subtle and creative critique of the ideas and often gendered positions adopted by male predecessors and contemporaries such as John Keble, Robert Browning and Dickens himself. Gill Gregory’s The Life and Work of Adelaide Procter: Poetry, Feminism and Fathers considers the career of this compelling and remarkable woman and discusses the extent to which she struggled to find her own voice in response to the works of some seminal literary ‘fathers’.

This book features a collection of essays, shedding subversively new light on Romanticism and its canon of big-six, white, male Romantics by focusing on marginalised, forgotten and lost writers and their long-neglected works. Probing the realms of literary and cultural lostness, this book identifies different strata of oblivion and shows how densely the net of contacts and rivalries was woven around the ostensibly monolithic stars of the Romantic age. It reveals how the lost poets inspired the production of anthologised poetry, that they served as indispensable muses, sidekicks and interlocutors of the big six and that their relevance for the literary scene has been continuously underrated. This is also surprisingly true for some creators of famous one-hit wonders (Frankenstein, The Vampyre) who were suddenly rocketed to fame or notoriety, but could not help seeing their other works of fiction turning into abortive flops.