Looking "Past Wordsworth and the Rest": Pretexts for Revision in Alice Meynell's "The Shepherdess"

AN ESSAY ON ARABELLA STUART, ALICE MEYNELL WRITES, "THE CRUEL PLACES of history are for ever emptied of their suffering tenants, and it is only to our inappeasable sympathies that the lifelong prisoners seem to be recaptured, sent back to their intolerable hours and places, long after they have once for all, unchallenged, passed the guard."1 Meynell' s "inappeasable sympathies" inspired her to rescue from the "long hollow spaces of time, perfectly dark and indescribed" (Prose and Poetry, p. 182), women of letters such as Arabella Stuart and Lucy Hutchinson; to reconsider the work of better known writers like Mary Wollstonecraft and the Brontes; and to defend Prue Steele and Tetty Johnson, the wives of literary men, against the disparagement of their husbands' critics and commentators.2 In "The Lady of the Lyrics," moreover, these sympathies compelled her to indict, albeit playfully, the male-authored image of women pervading poetry. Within the essays of the 1890s, Meynell returns again and again to the place of women, both as individuals and as cultural icons, in literature. These exercises develop the critical premises for a poetry that attempts to see "past Wordsworth and the rest."3 In this endeavor, she tries to resolve the conflict between inherited structures both formal and conceptual and the woman poet. "The Shepherdess," privately printed in Other Poems (1896) and published in Later Poems (1902), serves as a case in point. Examination of the lyric, however, isolates a central difficulty in coming to terms with Meynell's revisionist retrospection. By turns revered and reviled by critics, the poem represents a creative response to the problem of gender and genre explored in "The Lady of the Lyrics." Attempting to accommodate a distinctly feminine perspective, "The Shepherdess" parodically engages the conventions of lyric verse as exemplified in Byron's "She Walks in Beauty" and