Though working-class women in the nineteenth century included many accomplished and prolific poets, their work has often been neglected by critics and readers in favour of comparable work by men. Questioning the assumption that few poems by working-class women had survived, Florence Boos set out to discover supposedly lost works in libraries, private collections, and archives. Her years of research resulted in this anthology.

Working-Class Women Poets in Victorian Britain features poetry from a variety of women, including an itinerant weaver, a rural midwife, a factory worker protesting industrialization, and a blind Scottish poet who wrote in both the Scots dialect and English. In addition to biographical information and contemporary reviews of the poets’ work, the anthology also includes several photographs of the poets, their environment, and the journals in which their poems appeared.

Florence S. Boos is a Professor of English at the University of Iowa. 

Academics please note that this is a title classified as having a restricted allocation of complimentary copies. While the availability of bound complimentary copies is restricted to desk copies only, electronic complimentary copies are readily available for those professors wishing to consider this title for possible course adoption. Should you choose to adopt the book after viewing an electronic copy we will be happy to provide a bound desk copy.

Table of Contents: [Back to Top]

The Rural Poets

Anonymous
Isabella Chishom
Elizabeth Campbell
Jane Stevenson
Lizzie Smith
Mairi McPherson
Janet Hamilton

The Factory Poets

“Marie”
Ellen Johnston
Ruth Wills
Fanny Forrester
Ethel Carnie

Lyricists and Feminists

Eliza Cook
Mary Smith
Jessie Russell
Jeannie Paterson
Marion Bernstein