Mary Blachford Tighe (1772-1810) was a crucial force in shaping British Romanticism. Her influential six-canto epic, Psyche, or the Legend of Love (1805), along with her shorter poems, engaged the central issues of the period, often in advance of writers now considered canonical. With remarkable vitality and virtuosity, Tighe wrote about the tensions between love and loss, duty and desire, the spiritual and the sensuous, nation and family, and the Irish and the British, all while struggling with the debilitating illness that eventually claimed her life. This scholarly edition collects for the first time dozens of recently discovered poems, accompanied by Tighe's own illustrations, and identifies eight false attributions. A historical and biographical introduction from editors Paula R. Feldman and Brian C. Cooney discusses Tighe's work within a larger social and political context, placing renewed emphasis on the conflicts she experienced as a Methodist with Anglo-Irish roots. Editorial annotations shed new light on Tighe's life, revealing for the first time, for example, that her songs were performed during her lifetime on the Dublin stage. Meticulously edited, this volume builds on recent pioneering scholarship to restore and burnish Tighe's reputation as a major Romantic-era poet.

" Felicia Hemans (1793-1835), one of the most influential and widely-read poets of the nineteenth century, wrote Records of Woman in 1828 at the height of her long career. In the series, which includes nineteen poems about exemplary lives, Hemans explores what it means to be a woman, challenging traditional beliefs while at the same time reinforcing persistent stereotypes. Her work celebrates the lives, events, and imagined thoughts of unremembered women from different cultures and time periods whose deeds show nobility of spirit and inner strength. In her introduction, Paula Feldman examines how Hemans's poetry shaped and was shaped by nineteenth-century literary tastes, and she reconsiders the aesthetic value of Hemans's work and the current understanding of the nature of Romanticism.

Essays forging a new definition of Romanticism that includes the wide range of women's artistic expression.

Literary annuals played a major role in the popular culture of nineteenth-century Britain and America, and The Keepsake was the most distinguished, successful, and enduring of them all. The 1829 edition was stellar, with contributions by William Wordsworth, Mary Shelley, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Walter Scott, Letitia Landon, Felicia Hemans, and Percy Bysshe Shelley. The whole of The Keepsake for 1829 is reproduced here in facsimile, so readers can experience it as it was first published, with the text adorned by the original illustrations. An in-depth introduction by Paula R. Feldman contextualizes the volume for modern readers.

A Century of Sonnets is a striking reminder that some of the best-known and most well-respected poems of the Romantic era were sonnets. It presents the broad and rich context of such favourites as Percy Bysshe Shelley's "Ozymandias," John Keat's "On First Looking into Chapman's Homer," and William Wordsworth's "Composed Upon Westminster Bridge" by tracing the sonnet revival in England from its beginning in the hands of Thomas Edwards and Charlotte Smith to its culmination in the poetry of Elizabeth Barret Browning and Dante Gabriel Rossetti. This volume is the first in modern times to collect such sonnets, many never published in the twentieth century, and contains nearly five hundred examples composed between 1750 and 1850 by eighty-one poets, nearly half of them women.

A Century of Sonnets is a striking reminder of that some of the best known and most well-respected poems of the Romantic era were sonnets. It presents the broad and rich context of such favourites as Percy Bysshe Shelley's `Ozymandias' and William Wordsworth's `Composed upon Westminster Bridge', by tracing the sonnet revival in England from its beginning in the hands of Thomas Edwards and Charlotte Smith to its culmination in the poetry of Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Dante Gabriel Rossetti.