In 2018, She is Fierce – an anthology of poems by women from the ancient world to the present day – was published. I had edited it to fill a gap on my own bookshelf because I couldn’t find an accessible volume that gathered diverse women’s voices from across the centuries. We were delighted when it found an appreciative audience and I was thrilled when my editor suggested there was room for more.

I suggested a theme of wanderlust, escape and freedom (and, ironically, finished the book during lockdown.) I’ve always found poetry an escape hatch from the everyday, and I had noticed that women seemed especially drawn to these themes. This was perhaps because in many periods and places their lives had been so constrained – from eighteenth century Bluestockings being reviled by critics for discussing literature to Victorian ladies cloistered in the home and their corsets, unable to step outside without chaperones. As well as including today’s brightest talents, in editing She Will Soar - now out in a stunning neon green paperback - I met a remarkable cast of writers from the past, many of whom were unfamiliar to me because they had been overlooked during their lifetimes or largely forgotten since. It’s been an education and a pleasure to discover their stories and include their biographies as well as their poems in the book, and here are a few of them I feel should be more widely known and read.

Letitia Elizabeth Landon (1802 – 1838)

Letitia was better known as L.E.L., the enigmatic initials under which she published poetry in The Gentleman’s Magazine. They were eagerly awaited by readers, and writers including Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Christina Rossetti composed poems in her praise. Her much older editor fathered secret love children with her (she was forced to give them up), and since this was an open secret in Fleet Street, her bitter, almost exclusively male journalistic competitors saw to it that she was beset by rumours. Eventually Letitia married George Maclean and sailed with him to Ghana – then the Gold Coast – where he was governor. There she died of an overdose of Prussic Acid which was judged to have been accidental, despite some speculations to the contrary. L.E.L.’s romantic style fell out of fashion after her death, though her work has been rediscovered in recent decades. Lucasta Miller’s biography L.E.L.: The Lost Life and Scandalous Death of Letitia Elizabeth Landon comes highly recommended and I have a copy I’m looking forward to reading.

Anne Spencer (1882 - 1975)

Anne was a poet, teacher, librarian and civil rights activist and a key member of the Harlem Renaissance explosion of African-American culture. She was raised by her mother after her parents’ separation and, although she didn’t attend school until the age of eleven, she excelled in her education. Anne’s poetry addressed issues of racial and sexual inequality as well as expressing her deep love of nature, and her work was widely anthologised. She and her husband were active participants in the fight for civil rights and hosted figures including Martin Luther King Jr and Langston Hughes at their home in Lynchburg, now a museum.

Mary Elizabeth Coleridge (1861-1907)

Mary was the great-great-niece of Romantic poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge, but was better known during her life for her eerie, imaginative novels. She was too shy to publish her poetry under the famous family name, so she did so under the pseudonym ‘Anodos’. Her poetry only reached a wide audience after her death when another poet, Henry Newbolt, published them under her real name. Mary never married and devoted most of her time to lecturing at the Working Women’s College in London.

Gabriela Mistral (1889 – 1957)

Born in a remote village in the Chilean Andes, Gabriela was determined to qualify as a teacher despite being barred from studying because of her political journalism. On succeeding, she taught all around Chile and, later, organised educational programmes in Mexico. Travelling widely, Gabriela spent her life writing and acting in defence of the downtrodden. She worked for the League of Nations in Paris and as a diplomat, always opposing fascism, in Spain and Italy during the turbulent 1930s. In 1945 she was the first Spanish American writer to be awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. Although she is a central figure in Latin American poetry, her work was new to me.

Sarah Egerton (1668 – 1723)

As a teenager, Sarah published ‘The Female Advocate’ (1686), a stinging riposte to ‘Love Given O’er’ (1682) by Robert Gould which attacked the ‘pride, lust and inconstancy’ of women. Her horrified father banished her from London for this transgression, packing her off to relatives in the country. She was widowed young, and her second marriage – to a second cousin twenty years her senior, rather than Henry Pierce to whom many of her poems are dedicated – was scandalously stormy. The author Delariviere Manley attacked Sarah’s looks, called her a ‘She-Devil incarnate’ and claimed ‘she’s in love with all the handsome Fellows she sees’ – though it’s worth noting that he was far from unbiased since they had quarrelled viciously. Despite furious legal battles Sarah and her unhappy husband were not granted a divorce. Her work often raged passionately against women being denied freedom and education.

She Will Soar: Bright, Brave Poems of Freedom by Women is published by Macmillan.