She Will Soar: Why Women Write about Escape and Freedom

My second anthology of poems by women, She Will Soar, takes as its themes wanderlust, freedom and escape – themes which suddenly took on a strange relevance as I edited the book during lockdown. I have always believed in books and poetry as magic carpets that can take you anywhere, to places past, present and future, and realms both possible and impossible. Looking at the history of women’s writing, I felt women had particular cause to long to be lifted from their restrictive or humdrum lives by the power of literature.

Women faced certain bars to writing and publishing throughout history, and women who were not white, middle or upper class, cisgender, heterosexual or helpfully connected had even more stacked against them. Leisure, learning and liberty are key ingredients for any artist, and all have been in shorter supply for women than men throughout history. Even aristocratic women were usually afforded a rudimentary education compared to their brothers, and none at all in the highfalutin subjects considered ‘proper’ literary subjects: the Classics, theology or blood-drenched battle histories. More recently, the Pulitzer Prize winning poet Sharon Olds was rejected from an American literary magazine for writing about her children: “If you wish to write about this sort of subject, may we suggest the Ladies’ Home Journal”, they acidly suggested.

The role of women was to play muse, not poet. Any who dared pick up a pen themselves faced ridicule, and eighteenth century mothers fretted that their bookish daughters would repel suitors. Women faced condemnation because, in straying into the male arena of literature, it was assumed that they were neglecting their key duties as housewives and mothers. Anne Bradstreet, the ‘first poet’ of America, had to pretend that her naughty brother-in-law published her work without her knowledge, and he was at pains to include a preface insisting that Anne went without sleep to write rather than slacking in her domestic duties. I found a lot of beautiful nocturnal poems written by women from times past – and couldn’t help but wonder whether this was the only sliver of time they had to themselves, when their large families were finally asleep. It was even more shocking for women to promote their own work… so thrusting! So unseemly!

Anne Bradstreet imagined in a nineteenth century engraving

The job description of the wild and free artist popularised by the Romantics, tramping off to rugged and solitary places, was inaccessible to their female contemporaries. It was difficult to pursue such a path when your corsets conspired against you, you needed a chaperone to cross the road, and nobody had yet invented hiking boots. In the Victorian era, many women, particularly of the middle and upper classes, were almost cloistered in the home. I feel this constraint shows in the melancholy and often morbid notes of much women’s poetry from the period.

Women did write, and women did publish. Through the centuries they resorted to all sorts of strategies, and took advantage where they found it. Hannah More, born in 1745, funded her literary career with an annual pension from the man who jilted her after a long engagement. Her independence – and freedom from continuous years of childbearing and rearing – enabled her to become a noted philanthropist and lady of letters.

Hannah More

Some published anonymously, others under male or gender neutral pseudonyms. But often, even if they enjoyed great acclaim during their lifetimes, they were forgotten or fell from fashion afterwards. We know that Sappho was hailed as the Tenth Muse of the ancient world, but we have only scraps of her writing now. (It has been suggested that a pope ordered her ‘scandalous’ poetry burnt, but scholars suggest that, in fact, it just wasn’t considered worthy of preservation: a familiar fate for women’s work.)

Aemilia Lanyer, who wrote a daring epic poem that imagined the crucifixion from the point of view of Pontius Pilate’s wife in 1611, was all but forgotten by scholars until she was put forward as a potential model for the ‘Dark Lady’ of Shakespeare’s sonnets. It seems that a woman is only of interest when fixed in the lustful gaze of a man.

Aemelia Lanyer

No wonder women writers longed to spread their wings. And, in verse, they did. From the first African American poet, Phillis Wheatley, to civil rights activists and stars of the Harlem Renaissance such as Georgia Douglas Johnson and Anne Spencer, they wrote uplifting and inspirational poetry. From women as different as the reclusive Emily Dickinson and the inimitable Amy Lowell, who tirelessly promoted the cause of poetry, come poems that shout and shimmy with the delights of freedom. Suffragettes including Emily Wilding Davison write passionately about throwing open the door to a new world for women. It’s a pleasure and privilege to collect their words and bring them – I hope – to some new readers.

Anne Spencer

It is also a thrill to present the works of these writers alongside work they might surely have enjoyed from some of the most exciting poets writing today. We all know that women’s freedoms are still restricted - in some places dramatically, and in others insidiously. Girls and women in today’s world are still fighting for equal access to education, careers and independence. Here, my husband and I live in the same country, but I live under a different regime: one in which I was taught while still a child that an assailant might seize my ponytail as I walked and that, if that happened, I should shout, “Fire!” to raise the alarm because people don’t come to women’s aid. Women who don’t enjoy the many privileges I have been lucky enough to enjoy face greater barriers in every sphere. So words of both fury and the joy of freedom are still important to us. Poets including Salena Godden, Hollie McNish, Safia Elhillo, Jen Campbell, Kathleen Jamie, Sheena Patel, Caroline Bird, Carol Ann Duffy and Nikita Gill have written blazing and brilliant verses that deserve to be shouted to the sky and written in words six feet high, and it was the best job in the world to gather their poems and those of so many other amazing talents for this collection. I hope their work soars into readers’ hearts.

She Will Soar: Bright, Brave Poems of Freedom by Women is published by Macmillan and available to buy in paperback now from your local bookshop or online.

Voyages in Verse: Editing She Will Soar

She Will Soar: Bright, Brave Poems of Freedom by Women is about to take flight in a beautiful neon green paperback. It was the second anthology I edited that gathers work by women from the ancient world to the present day. The previous volume – She is Fierce – had been a general collection, designed to be both broad and friendly, and with no particular thematic focus. She Will Soar concentrates on poems about wanderlust, freedom and escape – all subjects that have preoccupied female writers, who have always operated under more constraints than their male counterparts. And, of course, the verses I gathered took on an extra resonance during the strange, locked-down months of spring 2020.

It starts – of course – with reading.

There were poems I already knew and wanted to include. To add to these, I plundered my own shelves and those in libraries, from the small but much-loved library in my home village to the British Library and brilliant National Poetry Library at the Southbank Centre (although they were closed during lockdown, they have some wonderful poetry available to browse online.) I bought second hand books, gratefully accepted bags of delights from my editor, devoured poetry publications and spent hours online. I lapped up recommendations wherever they were offered.

As the kitchen table and living room floor disappeared under the stacks of paper and books, and my apologetic intimacy with the postman deepened, I began to construct a longlist. I’m enormously grateful for technological advances that allowed me to avoid carrying a houseful of books to the nearest photocopier. An app called Tiny Scanner turns pages into printable PDFs when you photograph them on your phone. I turned my houseful of post-it noted books into towering stacks of paper, and closeted myself with them.

I always find the process of whittling down a longlist for an anthology completely agonising. It was important to me to include voices from different eras, points of view and places, so that each reader would find something that struck a chord with them, and so the anthology would have a varied music to it. So when I had two poems that expressed similar feelings, or were very like one another in tone and style, I tried to lose one of them to keep the reading experience broad and interesting. She Will Soar includes, as a result, poems from today’s spoken word superstars (Hollie McNish, Sophia Thakur), canonical big hitters (Christina Rossetti, Elizabeth Barrett Browning), forgotten pioneers (Charlotte Forten Grimké, Edith Södergran), suffragettes (Emily Wilding Davison herself, no less), talented students (Ellie Steel, Lauren Hollingsworth-Smith), eighteenth century Bluestockings (Anna Laetitia Barbauld, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu), a scandalous Victorian celebrity (L.E.L.), a ninth century courtesan-nun (Yü Hsüan-Chi) and a few national Laureates (Carol Ann Duffy, Gillian Clarke, Jackie Kay) among many others. It’s fascinating to find the same themes addressed in far flung places and distant eras by women leading such dramatically different lives.

Victorian celebrity poet Letitia Elizabeth Landon or L.E.L.

Since the anthology took freedom, travel and escape as its theme, some chapters suggested themselves readily. There were poems about journeys over land and by sea that travelled happily together. A chapter gathering poems in which birds and beasts appeared as emblems of freedom was eventually dropped, with my favourites from that section flying elsewhere in the volume to roost. I had also originally planned a chapter which looked at some of the ties that bound writers – constraints of society, gender and even dress – which became, as my wise editor pointed out, rather heavy reading. Some of these poems were cut and others placed elsewhere.

Once the whittling had been done, and the poems were divided into thematic chapters including ‘Words can set you free’, ‘Flights of fancy’ and ‘Taking flight’, I closeted myself with print outs of each chapter. I read the poems – silently and out loud, as I hope readers will do – and shuffled the order until it felt… right. I aim for variety but also a sense of flow even though I think anthologies are as often dipped into as read in sequence.

My final task was to write the chapter openings. In these and the book’s introduction I tried very briefly to say something about the particular circumstances of female writers: how limited their social, political, literary, economic and educational freedoms had been through many of the centuries covered. I researched and wrote brief biographies of each of them, and found some of the stories of women from earlier eras immensely moving. Many defied disapproving husbands and fathers, dismissive editors, enormous families, vicious critics or society’s censure. Some faced mental or physical illness, and even fled repressive regimes. At times it was considered so disgraceful for women to publish, they wrote under male names, as the Brontës and George Eliot did. We will never know how many more didn’t feel they could write, or wrote and didn’t publish. But these women wrote. Lots of them have fallen out of fashion, some of them were ignored or didn’t dare publish during their lifetimes. Now, though, I hope they will be read alongside some of the most talented and inspired writers of today.

This article first appeared on the Poetry by Heart website.

She Will Soar is still available in hardback or to pre-order in paperback. Please consider ordering from your local bookshop!

Five Forgotten Women Writers to Discover

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.