Recasting women's stories : in the poetry of Felicia Hemans, Letitia Landon, and Christina Rossetti

The dissertation reads the poetry written by three British women, Felicia Hemans, Letitia Landon, and Christina Rossetti, exploring the ways they present, and recast, conventional stories of women. The two Romantic poets make use of narrative strategies to overturn the story’s meanings from within. The Victorian poet, Rossetti, takes over their theme of love, reworking it from the perspective of Christianity. Like her predecessors, Rossetti presents her heroines as experiencing displacement and loss in society, thereby upending traditional Christian views of women. Focusing on the conventional figures featured in their poetry, such as Sappho, Corinne, Eve and other female sufferers, the dissertation repeatedly pays attention to a poetic genre the three women often adopt: the dramatic monologue. The soliloquists in their poems occasionally address their interlocutors as “friends”, asking them for commitment to their songs. The three poets explore the relation between the poet and her audience, her society, and their questioning persists, ever asking the reader to give them back a response to their gift of poetry.