Women’s Writing in the British Isles from the Beginnings to the Present
Robert Southey
-
Standard Name: Southey, Robert
Robert Southey was a Romantic poet, one of the Lake Poets with Wordsworth
and Coleridge
. In addition to epics, ballads, and other verse, he penned several plays and contributed regularly to the ToryQuarterly Review. His prose works, for which he was celebrated during his lifetime, were primarily historical, ecclesiastical,and biographical, in addition to travel writing. He also produced translations (from French and Spanish), editions, and anthologies. He enjoyed an excellent reputation in his day, and for his last thirty years of life served as Poet Laureate.
More important than his teaching were her own efforts in a congenial atmosphere. The family would read aloud from poems and plays, providing their own appreciation and criticism. In her diary she wrote: In our...
Betham, Ernest, editor. A House of Letters. Jarrold and Sons.
69, 70
MMB
acquired a wide acquaintance in London. She became a close friend...
Health
Mary Matilda Betham
MMB
had some kind of general breakdown of health whose beginning Ernest Betham dates to about 1818 (though she seems to have been well when her Vignettes: in Verse appeared this year). Robert Southey
reported...
Textual Production
Mary Matilda Betham
In March 1799 MMB
was apparently working both at some translation (which she suspected would not sell) and a novel. Neither has been identified or is known to have been printed.
Betham, Ernest, editor. A House of Letters. Jarrold and Sons.
61-2
In 1810 Southey
Literary responses
Mary Matilda Betham
MMB
said that this book received flattering praises in reviews.
Betham, Mary Matilda. “Preface”. Crow-Quill Flights.
7
It also brought compliments of some distinguished persons and two tributary effusions from writers from profession: Mr J. (apparently Edward Jerningham
) and...
Literary responses
Mary Matilda Betham
Robert Southey
wrote to MMB
that this volume contains so much of what is really good that I hope the same powers will one day be employed upon something of greater extent.
Betham, Ernest, editor. A House of Letters. Jarrold and Sons.
104
The Critical...
Intertextuality and Influence
Mary Matilda Betham
The work she refers to as her source is Gervais de La Rue
's Dissertation on the Life and Writings of Mary, an Anglo-Norman Poetess of the 13th century, translated into English under the...
Literary responses
Anna Letitia Barbauld
J. W. Croker
's notice in the Quarterly Review (in June 1812, wrongly attributed by some to Southey
) was most offensive of all. He reached for the gendered weapons so often drawn against Mary Wollstonecraft
Literary responses
Anna Letitia Barbauld
ALB
was a presence in the early poetry of Wordsworth
and Coleridge
, though they later distanced themselves from her so emphatically. Her work appeared in magazines in the USA before the end of the...
Friends, Associates
Anna Letitia Barbauld
Her biographer William McCarthy, speculating on causes for this reversal of former admiration, mentions Coleridge's painful feelings for his mother and his wife, his leaving the Dissenters for the Church of England, and the predominance...
Violence
Anna Letitia Barbauld
These young men joked together about inflicting physical violence on ALB
: Coleridge
vowed to cut her to the Heart; Southey
wrote that Lamb
ought to set fire to her wig (a fictional object...
Friends, Associates
Joanna Baillie
She met Wordsworth
and Southey
in the Lake District in 1808, and was corresponding with Wordsworth by 1812.
Baillie, Joanna. The Collected Letters of Joanna Baillie. Editor Slagle, Judith Bailey, Fairleigh Dickinson University Press.
1: 240
Carhart, Margaret S. The Life and Work of Joanna Baillie. Archon Books.
23
He named her his ideal English [sic] gentlewoman.
Carhart, Margaret S. The Life and Work of Joanna Baillie. Archon Books.
