The Poet and the Profits

Abstract

What did it mean — in financial terms — to be a successful Romantic woman poet? What were the economic realities and possibilities of her life? What standard of living could she achieve? Was it possible to maintain a middle-class household on poetry writing alone? What were the most lucrative sources of income from poetry production, and how did financial considerations affect a poet’s literary decisions? To what extent might a woman poet participate in negotiating terms with publishers and even in making marketing decisions about her work? How might economic decisions affect her poetic reputation? We are remarkably ignorant about such matters. For the most part, twentieth-century literary historians have relied on reviews or on commentary in letters, journals and biographical memoirs to gauge the success of women poets among their contemporaries. But these, taken alone, are imperfect measures at best, subject to bias, sometimes skewed by manipulation or affected by the accident of what documents may or may not have survived the years. What the market was consistently willing to pay is, in many ways, a more reliable measure of the extent of a poet’s contemporary audience and the attention she commanded among readers. Yet, few have considered this dimension of Romantic literary life.¹ But the production of poetry was, among other things, a business proposition for the professional women poets of the Romantic era. To recognize that, to explore its intricacies, is to go a long way toward understanding the peculiar conditions of authorship during the period.

A version of this essay appeared in the Keats-Shelley Journal, 56 (Summer 1997), pp. 148-76, and is reproduced with permission.