British Victorian women's periodicals : beauty, civilization, and poetry /

Released in the "Nineteenth-Century Major Lives and Letters" series, this volume surveys poetry in British women's periodicals from the 1830s to the end of the 19th century and serves as a complement to Margaret Beetham's A Magazine of Her Own?: Domesticity and Desire in the Woman's Magazine, 1800-1914 (1996). Ledbetter (Texas State Univ., San Marcos) sees poetry and women's magazines as creating a center of power for women, particularly in the religious civilizing role that the Victorian domestic ideology prescribed for them. The author also looks at editors as mentors and instructors of fledgling poets. Rather than filler, as it has tended to be regarded, poetry in women's magazines performed important functions and is an untapped resource for gaining insight into women's lives. By examining the poetry one can get a grasp of its function, which was to instruct in the ideologies of religion, patriotism, the empire, feminine moral superiority, and the household deities of family, love, and marriage. A valuable resource for students of 19th-century British literature, culture, and history. Summing Up: Recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty. J. D. Vann emeritus, University of North Texas