Post by moira on Jul 14, 2008 22:05:38 GMT 2
downloadable book
Augusta Davies Webster (1837-1894)
This foremother posting consists of a posting I first wrote where I followed what is generally known about Webster and a much respected anthology, Victorian Women Poets edited and introduced by Margaret Reynolds and Angela Leighton. The perspective was based on Robert Browning and what is valued and printed as a result of looking at his poetry as an ideal or norm. Months later after some threads on Wompo about mothers and daughters in poems, and about women's poems to children, I returned to Webster and used a different anthology and went searching on the Net with this different perspective in mind and produced a very different picture. The two postings together and the conversation afterwards on Wompo are all instructive.
1st foremother posting on Webster:
October 19, 2007
It's difficult to show Augusta Davies Webster at her best in an email as her best poems are long dramatic monologues of the type made familiar by Robert Browning, with the difference that (I quote from Leighton and Reynolds's excellent Victorian Women Poets once again), Webster turns her "spotlight on women:" "ordinary, humble, downtrodden women," Virginia Woolf's Mrs Brown if you will. In Websiter's poetry, "Circe is, ultimately, not a dangerous seductress but a lonely, frustrated woman, with none too high an opinion of men. One of the most powerful of these is online as "A Castaway" (the Victorian term for a fallen woman ejected from her home and left to make it on the streets):
www.poemhunter.com/poem/a-castaway/
This is said to have been written in response to Dante Gabriel Rossetti's "Jenny" (Webster was an acquaintance of the Rossettis).
She had two major book-length books of such long poems and shorter ones too (1866, 1870). For her shorter poems, these include a sonnnet sequence which is powerful, "Mother and Daughter."
I quote but one:
No 20:
There's one I miss. A little questioning maid
That held my finger, trotting by my side,
And smiled out of her pleased eyes open wide,
Wondering and wiser at each word I said.
And I must help her frolics if she played,
And I must feel her trouble if she cried;
My lap was hers past right to be denied;
She did my bidding, but I more obeyed.
Dearer she is to-day, dearer and more;
Closer to me, since sister womanhoods meet;
Yet, like poor mothers some long while bereft,
I dwell on toward ways, quaint memories left,
I miss the approaching sound of pit-pat feet,
The eager baby voice outside my door.
We had a thread a while back where people asked why women didn't write more poems about children. I suggested they did, only many were not printed, destroyed, are not well-known.
*********
English poet, dramatist, and translator (Julia) Augusta Davies Webster, born 1837, at Poole, Dorset. Her father was a vice-admiral in the British Navy. She wrote under the name Cecil Home for a time. Her activities in support of women's suffrage led to her election as one of the first women on the London School Board. She was in her time a forcible woman who worked and wrote alongside Francis Power Cobbe and John Stuart Mill. She wrote for The Examiner and her articles were gathered under the title A Housewife's Opinion. She "inveighs against the expense and unhealthiness of women's clothes" and has one against "Matrimony as a Means of Livelihood." Nothing obsolete here
.She worked hard in public to increase women's education and for the vote. She ridiculed the system at Cambridge which allowed women to study but deprived them of any degree. (You can read about the results of that in modern books about women writers, say Selina Hastings on Rosamond Lehmann.) Only the dignity of a "publicly-recognized award" and the result in a decent respectable job which would support the woman is the real remedy for not only women's troubles but those of their family's. Another article: "Parliamentary Franchise for Women Rate-Payers." Women pay taxes in effect. She "sent a copy to Christina Rossetti whose poetry she much admired."
An obituary about her in the Atheneum placed her with George Eliot and Frances Power Cobbe as a "major humanitarian, liberal thinker" of her day. Her "social realism" and political commitment" went out of fashion around the time she died. In her poetry and writing she "investigates various social inequalities which force women into prostitution. Leighton and Reynolds (who I have been quoting) call her "one of the more ruthlessly materialistic of all women Victorian poets.
Sites:
www.sonnets.org/webster.htm
eir.library.utoronto.ca/rpo/display/poet386.html
www.dienes-and-dienes.com/Augusta_Webster.html
www.uoguelph.ca/englit/victorian/INTRO/webster.html
rmc.library.cornell.edu/womenLit/learned_poets/Webster_L.htm
oldpoetry.com/authors/Augusta%20Davies%20Webster
Broadview Press has recently published a collection of Webster's works.
See also:
Patricia Rigg, "Augusta Webster and the Lyric Muse: The Athenaeum and
Webster's Poetics," Victorian Poetry 42(2)(Summer 2004): 135-164.
Patricia Rigg, "Augusta Webster: The Social Politics of Monodrama,"
Victorian Review 26.2 (2000): 75-107.
Christine Sutphin, "The Representation of Women's Heterosexual Desire
in Augusta Webster's 'Circe' and 'Medea in Athens',"
Women's Writing5(3)(1998).
Christine Sutphin, "Human Tigresses, Fractious Angels, and Nursery
Saints: Augusta Webster's A Castaway and Victorian Discourses on
Prostitution and Women's Sexuality,"
Victorian Poetry 38(4)(Winter 2000): 511-532.
Robert Fletcher, "Convent Thoughts: Augusta Webster and the Body
Politics of the Victorian Cloister," Victorian Literature and Culture31(1)
(March 2003): 295-313.
Posted by Ellen Moody
2nd foremother posting on Webster:
June 20, 2008
Re: Augusta Webster -- redux
Dear all,
After our long thread on mothers and daughters in poetry, I went looking to see if I could find poems between mothers and daughters and discovered I had written posting about Augusta Webster where I included one of her sonnets from a sequence called "Mother and Daughter." At the time there had been a thread where a few people wondered why it was women didn't write more poems about children. I suggested they did, only many were not printed, were destroyed, or are not well-known or rarely printed. And so I included but one sonnet by her from this sequence. Her better known poems and the ones she is known and admired for (those which are typically reprinted in anthologies she appears in) are the dramatic monologues familiar to many from Robert Browning's poetry (e.g, "My Last Duchess").
So today I return to her and reprint (so to speak) the one I included last time and add two more:
Sonnets from Mother and Daughter
No. 14
To love her as today is so great bliss
I needs must think of morrows almost loath,
Morrows wherein the flower's unclosing growth
Shall make my darling other than she is.
The breathing rose excels the bud I wis,
Yet bud that will be rose is sweet for both;
And "by-and-by" seems like some later troth
Named in the moment of a lover's kiss.
Yes, I am jealous, as of one now strange
That shall instead of her possess my thought,
Of her own self made new by any change,
Of her to be by ripening morrows brought.
My rose of women under later skies!
Yet, ah! my child with the child's trustful eyes!
No. 16
She will not have it that my day wanes low,
Poor of the fire its drooping sun denies,
That on my brow the thin lines write good-byes
Which soon may be read plain for all to know,
Telling that I have done with youth's brave show;
Alas! and done with youth in heart and eyes,
With wonder and with far expectancies,
Save but to say "I knew such long ago."
She will not have it. Loverlike to me,
She with her happy gaze finds all that's best,
She sees this fair and that unfretted still,
And her own sunshine over all the rest:
So she half keeps me as she'd have me be,
And I forget to age, through her sweet will.
No. 20
There's one I miss. A little questioning maid
That held my finger, trotting by my side,
And smiled out of her pleased eyes open wide,
Wondering and wiser at each word I said.
And I must help her frolics if she played,
And I must feel her trouble if she cried;
My lap was hers past right to be denied;
She did my bidding, but I more obeyed.
Dearer she is to-day, dearer and more;
Closer to me, since sister womanhoods meet;
Yet, like poor mothers some long while bereft,
I dwell on toward ways, quaint memories left,
I miss the approaching sound of pit-pat feet,
The eager baby voice outside my door.
***********
It's interesting to me that like Anne Hunter, Augusta Webster writes of the passing of time. Readers might find her possessive in No. 14; she wishes her daughter would not change, develop into a woman, is "jealous" to think someone different will possess her (Augusta's) thought, sees in her daughter's lips lips that a man will eventually kiss. (She assumes her daughter is heterosexual.) In the second she talks of her own age, and how her daughter's love for her makes her young to her daughter and thus to herself. The note in this one (I hope no one will find it out of sight) reminds me of the open vulnerability and tenderness of Shakespeare's sonnets; those who have read them may remember how he unashamedly presents himself as in need, and also talks in the same vein of how his lover will regard him when he is old.
The first two are from a group of four reprinted in British Women Poets of the 19th Century, ed. Margaret Randolph Higgonet. Higgonet just reprints these four sonnets and "Circe" (which is too long to put here or it would make a striking contrast to Margaret Atwood's). The last one I found on the Net and is about missing the young child and I fancy is more conventional.
Looking at Augusta Webster's biography as I wrote it that day I find I left out an emphasis I now see in Higgonet's brief life of Webster. Higgonest says that Webster was a "devoted mother" to an "only daughter." I used another anthology for the life I put on the list and went to the Net and these led me to omit much of her personal life. For example, she married Thomas Webster, a fellow of Trinity College; she translated Aeschylus's Prometheus Bound; she wrote one novel called Lilian Gray. Christina Rossetti is said to have considered Webster a poet "next to Barrett Browning in poetic power;" that Vita Sackville-West thought Webster's poetry "good but powerful," and William Rossetti introduced "Mother and Daughter" praising their "natural" beauty of the depictions of real affection.
*************
Conversation on Wompo:
Dear Ellen,
Thanks for this gorgeous little essay complete with references.
Fascinating--the poems especially w. your comments.
Jean
Annie F... to WOM-PO
These are wonderful to read. Thanks so much. Where can I read the rest of the sequence--in the Broadview book?
Annie
Dear Annie, Jean and all,
What was interesting to me is how on first looking into the work of Augusta Webster I was led to ignore these "Mother and Daughter" poems, and presented just one to "prove" in the previous argument that women did indeed write poems to their children but they were not printed, or were destroyed, or were marginalized. I was doing the same thing -- marginalizing a different or fuller perspective on Webster's work.
I was using an influential and rightly respected anthology of Victorian Women Poets where Webster was praised and pushed as a clone (in effect), nearly (not just as of course), nearly in the range of Robert Browning -- and for her self-evident feminism and progressive politics. An important book was written on 19th century women painters by Deborah Cherry where she argued 1) that the subject matters and types of painting women did in the 19th century show a very different kind of experience, aspiration and point of view than mens' and to continually try to find women impressionists, women expressionists, and so on, is to erase or marginalize most of what they did, coming up with say two women painters at most (Morisot and Cassett) who of course were not nearly as original, good, etc as the men. But the woman didn't want to paint impressionist paintings of nature. She also argued their careers look very different and you have to have different criteria for seeing the careers.
So Webster's long sequence of "Mother and Daughter" is marginalized or ignored in an important anthology. Anthologies, histories of literature, are enormously important and influential in what is know in passing and thus what is looked into. The Net of course enables us nowadays to begin to bypass this, but as long as the Net is often dissed, despised, and looked upon as having work put on it that somehow doesn't count, the putting on of whole slews of poems by women doesn't make the cut for discussion among those who count. Thus (this one comes to mind) Joy Struthers remains the author of Mrs Miniver, which columns were completely transformed into something very different from the original in the movie (Mrs Miniver was implicitly anti-war), so that she is really known as the author attached to that movie. But if you go on the Net you find she was a poet and a good one and wrote a lot of poems. Her granddaughter attempted to do justice to her in a biography. But none of this reaches not just the general public but many people who consider themselves well read and learned, particularly male poets and critics who might find Struthers poems just so ho hum (as many male critics professed to be bored out of their tiny little minds with (Jane Austen Book Club).
Mother and Daughter is published by Kessinger Publishing; the company publishes the equivalent of Gutenburg online etexts -- very plain, white texts - and I've come across little known novels and memoirs by women you can get that way inexpensively. The description of the Broadview Press edition suggests what is concentrated on are the dramatic monologues and feminist, progressive prose pieces. However, it's hard to tell since it's said to be a very good selection, and generous
Ellen