Illustrated Essay

These two poems span the era of the poetess whose mind could never be feminine enough to escape the barrenness to which she is condemned by living a life of the mind.

The women writer's barrenness is emphasized in poems about Joan of Arc, Corinne of Italy, and Sappho of Lesbos written by writers in the poetess tradition. The barreness is implied earlier, in 1802, by Coleridge's poem in which his "sweet Hope" is that the "poetess" will be a "Maid" with a "holier mind" than Sappho, holier because of what she has done -- holier "in deed," to miquote the poem slightly:

Nor do I know a sweeter Hope than this,

Than this sweet Hope, by judgment unreproved,

That our own Britain, our dear mother Isle,

May boast one Maid, a poetess indeed,

Great as th’ impassioned Lesbian, in sweet song,

And O! of holier mind, and happier fate.

The "happier fate" even contains a kind of veiled threat: if you aren't a Maid and you write poetry, beware -- you'll have to die like Sappho. 

Despite the alleged chastity of the poetess (insisted upon in that poetry), these frontispieces to annuals present eroticized femininity.

Felicia Hemans's Properzia Rossi and L.E.L.'s Improvisatrice, eponymous heroines of these tragic  poems, die regretting their chastity which seems to have been enforced, or caused, by their devotion to their art.

But despite the barrenness of women poets in the eponymous poems written about them by women writers of the annuals, the frontispieces to these literary annuals distinctly portray women as erotic.  What’s not really clear is erotic for whom: the worry may be that the poetesses and female readers of the annuals care more about each other.  In that case, their barreness is not due to having been spurned by a male lover, as so many poems assiduously protest, but by choice.  In this way, the choice to become an artist – Properzia Rossi’s, for instance, in Felicia Hemans’s poem of that name – somehow entails or resembles the choice to love only women.  This ambiguity is the legacy of Sappho, as Robinson’s sanitizing gloss makes clear:

SAPPHO undertook to inspire the Lesbian women with a taste for literature; many of them received instructions from her, and foreign women increased the number of her disciples. She loved them to excess, because it was impossible for her to love otherwise; and she expressed her tenderness in all the violence of passion: your surprize at this will cease, when you are acquainted with the extreme sensibility of the Greeks; and discover, that amongst them the most innocent connections often borrow the impassioned language of love.(Mary Robinson’s Account of Sappho in Sappho and Phaon, 1796.)

 

In Dangerous Intimacies, Lisa Moore situates “Sapphic love” on the eighteenth-century ideological landscape, and Yopie Prins shows the figure’s evolution in nineteenth-century verse.