ABSTRACT
First published in 2006. Women and Romanticism’s fifth volume covers The Golden Violet, with its Tales of Romance and Chivalry: and Other Poems. The collection reproduces work by Letitia Landon and thus addresses yet another gap in current accounts of women and Romanticism. Although Landon is now readily acknowledged as a significant author of the period, it is also the case that critical examinations of her life and work have tended to reinforce her own carefully crafted image as a poetess.Until the 1980s, a five-volume collection of materials on ‘Women and Romanticism’ would have been inconceivable, since Romantic studies largely restricted itself to a consideration of the major male poets of the period (William Blake, William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Lord Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley and John Keats), When women were present in accounts of Romanticism, they were considered in terms of their literary function (as objects of representation), or in relation to their domestic (as mothers, daughters, wives and lovers of the authors). Indeed, the first Romantic women writers to enter academic discourse were those with familial connections to the canonized poets: Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Shelley and Dorothy Wordsworth. Other writers of interest in the 1970s included Frances Burney and Jane Austen.
