Mary Elizabeth Coleridge, Literary Influence and Technologies of the Uncanny

Abstract

Wanderers, ghosts, and outcasts people the poetry of Mary Elizabeth Coleridge. Contemporary readers such as Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar take the dispossessed to be symbolic of her perceived exclusion from the literary heritage of her great-great uncle, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, to whom she is in thrall (Gilbert and Gubar 1979, 15–16).¹ Katherine McGowran takes this further:

While the ‘restless wanderer’ may prove a figure of disruption, Coleridge somehow always remains outside, or under the rule of someone else. The great-great uncle is both someone who leads her in the direction of this ‘other’ world yet also someone who has been there before. He is the host and she is the guest, her identity is confused by the sense of being a visitor in someone else’s poem. (McGowran, ed. Leighton 1996, 190)

In this Bloomian reading, Mary Elizabeth Coleridge is doomed to be the weak poet who is ‘haunted by the witches and demons of Samuel Taylor’s texts’ (McGowran 1996, 186). Although her wanderer figures are often read as disrupting the relationship with the dominant precursor poet, the critic slips back into essentializing the dynamic as a monolith: Mary Elizabeth Coleridge is always the outsider, the slave to the master-male poet.