ABSTRACT

Many in England had already lost faith in the Revolutionary project by the time that Richard Polwhele published his infamous tirade against Mary Wollstonecraft and her “female band despising NATURE’S law”, “The Unsex’d Females” (1798). Linda Colley observes that pre-existing anxieties about the position of women became “still more intense in Britain after war with France broke out in 1793” (Britons: Forging the Nation, 259), and Polwhele’s poem reflects an increasingly reactionary climate in post-Revolution England, with hostility directed more and more towards outspoken women. This essay examines a range of overtly political poetry published by Mary Robinson, Anna Laetitia Barbauld, and Isabella Lickbarrow between 1792 and 1818. It suggests that understanding the pervasive culture of fear within which these women wrote allows us to better understand the conditions that produced the more conservative approach to poetic production taken by women like Felicia Hemans and Letitia Landon in the second decade of the 1800s.

摘要

当 Richard Polwhele 发表臭名昭著的长篇大论反对 Mary Wollstonecraft 和她的“蔑视自然法则的女性乐队”，“The Unsex'd Females”（1798 年）时，英国的许多人已经对革命计划失去了信心。琳达·科利 (Linda Colley) 观察到，“在 1793 年与法国爆发战争之后，英国对女性地位的先前存在的焦虑变得更加强烈”（英国人：锻造国家，259），而 Polwhele 的诗反映了革命后英格兰日益反动的气氛，敌意越来越多地指向直言不讳的女性。本文考察了玛丽·罗宾逊、安娜·莱蒂蒂亚·巴鲍德和伊莎贝拉·利克巴罗在 1792 年至 1818 年间发表的一系列公开的政治诗歌。在 1800 年代的第二个十年中，Felicia Hemans 和 Letitia Landon 等女性对诗歌创作采取了更为保守的方法。