Victorian Women’s Poetry and the Science of SocietySociology in Verse

Repositions Victorian women’s poetry at the centre of nineteenth-century Britain’s reception, construction, and representation of sociology

• Thoughtfully engages with the long tradition of socio-literary study that both stretches back to the nineteenth century itself and extends into contemporary literary scholarship
• Demonstrates the heuristic potential of a methodological framework first articulated by Maria K. Bachman and Albert D. Pionke in The Socio-Literary Imaginary in 19th and 20th Century Britain (Routledge, 2019) for the study of nineteenth-century poetry
• Provocatively juxtaposes canonical and virtually unknown, historically underrated and only-recently appreciated poetry by women, providing fresh individual readings and startling collective interventions
• Interrogates late-nineteenth-century sociologists’ accounts of the value of poetry for public education, showing how their gendered preferences, whether intentional or conventional, contributed to women poets’ exclusion from socio-literary history

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.