Constance Naden

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Standard Name: Naden, Constance
Birth Name: Constance Caroline Naden
Pseudonym: C. N.
Pseudonym: Constance Arden
Pseudonym: C. A.
CN was a poet, atheist, scientific theorist, and philosopher. Her verse, published early in her short, late-nineteenth-century career, reflects her interests in the biological sciences, the question of evolution, issues of religious faith and doubt, and the position of women. In both dramatic monologues and third-person narrative poems, she presents dilemmas of the head and heart in contemporary and historical settings with vivid perception and often with humour or even satire. After publishing two collections of poetry she abandoned writing verse. An accomplished student of science, she produced a number of speeches on scientific and political subjects, and later turned to philosophical writing, most of which remained unpublished till after her death.

Connections

Connections Author name Excerpt
Intertextuality and Influence Mathilde Blind
The Ascent of Man gathers together a number of longer and shorter poems (written with immense energy in varying metres), but through the whole runs the theme of human life springing from a struggle for...
Publishing Jane Hume Clapperton
Journalism continued to be an important outlet for JHC . Her later articles appeared in Shafts (Reform in Domestic Life on 15 June 1893) and in The Women's Penny Paper (a review of Constance Naden
Textual Features Ellen Mary Clerke
This and the following poem, Jewels, place EMC in the company of her contemporaries Mathilde Blind and Constance Naden by employing the language and concepts of recent science in lyric poetry. Other poems are...
Textual Production L. S. Bevington
Until recently, comment on LSB has dealt exclusively with her poetry. About a decade after her death Alfred H. Miles remembered her as the poetess of evolutionary science.
Miles, Alfred H., editor. The Poets and the Poetry of the Nineteenth Century. AMS Press, 1967.
9: 229
While he tarred her with...

Timeline

1 October 1880
Mason College or Mason Science College in Birmingham, founded at a cost of more than £200,000 by Sir Josiah Mason , who had made his fortune out of nibs for pens, opened its doors to students.