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Nineteenth-Century American Women Poets: An Anthology; A Sweet, Separate Intimacy: Women Writers of the American Frontier, 1800-1920
Edited by Paula Bernat Bennett. Malden: Blackwell, 1998. 524 pp. $88.95/$36.95 paper.
Edited by Susan Cummins Miller. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2000. 446 pp. $59.95/$21.95 paper.
Scholars of nineteenth-century American women's literature have struggled to produce anthologies for classroom use that provide a diverse representation of writings and a critical framework through which to view these selections. With the recent publication of Nineteenth-Century American Women Poets and A Sweet, Separate Intimacy: Women Writers of the American Frontier, 1800-1920, Paula Bernat Bennett and Susan Cummins Miller have contributed to this effort, but with differing degrees of success.
Paula Bernat Bennett's years of recovery work have resulted in an incredibly useful text that challenges our preconceptions about nineteenth-century women's poetry and pushes us to think in more complicated ways about this genre and nineteenth-century American literature in general. "Like other scholars," Bennett writes in the introduction to Nineteenth-Century American Women Poets, "I had come to my field assuming that `major' figures would be the heart of it. What I discovered, however, -- at least where nineteenth-century American women's poetry was concerned -- is that the heart lay elsewhere, not in the poet but in the poem" (xl). The genius of this anthology is that it is shaped according to this insight.
Nineteenth-Century...