Singing by Herself

To celebrate National Poetry Month, this week’s review explores literary solitude through “female and feminized figures” in 18th-century poetry

Posted on April 7, 2025 in Reviews of the Month

Singing by Herself: Lonely Poets in the Long Eighteenth Century

Worsley, Amelia. Cornell, 2024
258p bibl index, 9781501776274 $46.95, 9781501776298

Old-fashioned literary historians saw 18th-century Britain as an age of sociability—the public sphere, urbanization, coffee-house culture—contrasting it with the Romantic era, when poets wandered lonely as a cloud. Recent critics have suggested that the history of literary solitude is more complex, with some figures choosing to be alone and others having loneliness thrust upon them. Worsley (Amherst College) argues that the poetry of loneliness is gendered, and that critics have so far missed a tradition of “female and feminized figures” who lament their loneliness (p. xii). Each of five chapters focuses on one major poet—John Milton, Anne Finch, Alexander Pope, Thomas Gray, and Charlotte Smith—with glances at both English and classical literature and mythology. Worsley develops a different aspect of literary loneliness in each chapter while sketching out a chronology from the mid-17th century to the early part of the Romantic era. The scholarship is both broad and deep, and the close readings are convincing. The result is a valuable contribution to the study of 18th-century poetry, which raises questions about gender, agency, embodiment, suicide, and sexual violence.

Summing Up: Highly recommended. Graduate students through faculty.
Reviewer: J. T. Lynch, Rutgers University–Newark
Interdisciplinary Subjects: Women’s & Gender Studies
Subject: Humanities – Language & Literature – English & American
Choice Issue: Apr 2025

Singing by Herself

To celebrate National Poetry Month, this week’s review explores literary solitude through “female and feminized figures” in 18th-century poetry