Revising the Feminine

Abstract

Wordsworth’s tender, elegiac ‘Lucy’ poems (five were composed 1798–9), published in 1800; one ‘I travelled among unknown men’ was composed in 1801 and published much later in 1807) have long been the subject of critical interest. Each evokes a feminine figure. Whether adult or child, named or nameless, she is bound to the natural landscape. She crystallises loss, intense longing. She is the impossible object of the poet’s desire, an iconic representation of the Romantic feminine. Both Dorothy Wordsworth and Mary Shelley knew the poems. While Dorothy read and copied them out from the earliest versions onwards, Mary Shelley read them across a gulf of time. The first Romantics were still alive, but that way of life, those revolutionary aspirations had vanished. As late as her novel The Last Man (1826), Wordsworth’s Lucy provided Mary Shelley with a way of reading, and revising, the Romantic vision of femininity.