Review: Sarah Parker, Form and Modernity in Women’s Poetry, 1895-1922: A Line of Her Own (Routledge, 2024)

Abstract

The work of recovering voices that have been marginalized – whether by dominant narratives of literary history or hierarchical discourses of gender, sexual orientation, and race, or both – requires painstaking archival research to forge innovative pathways from the present to the past. Reception history, in particular, read deftly against the grain by Sarah Parker in her new book, exposes the legacies of poets Alice Meynell, Michael Field (Katherine Bradley and Edith Cooper), Dollie Radford, and Katharine Tynan truncated not only by misogyny but also periodization and ageism. A revisionist project, Form and Modernity in Women’s Poetry, 1895-1922: A Line of Her Own ‘sets out an alternative poetic history for the period 1895-1922, focusing on the twentieth-century careers of [these] women poets who continue to be primarily associated with the late nineteenth century’, as Parker elaborates in her erudite introduction richly framing the book’s thesis (p. 2).