The Romantic Period was an artistic, literary and intellectual movement, it is called such since, the period brought in many changes which include the rapid spread of the ownership of clocks with minute hands throughout the late nineteenth-century. This period made lawyers to condemn old sundials as childish. It was also the time when culturally as well as socially, termed as an age of transition from gothic writing characteristics of the second half of the eighteenth-century with a particular appeal to a new generation of women readers, to a more patriarchal aesthetics in which the popular styles of earlier ages were dismissed as unmanly. This was the period in which men writers flourished. Yet there are many female writers who never had their fame glow as their male counterparts. This paper will deal with the hidden female writers of the Romantic era. This paper will also mainly focus on the rethinking of the individual and the Romantic society at large.

1. Joshua Gnana Raj P
Ph D Research Scholar (English)
Dr B J Geetha
Assistant Professor of
English

2. ■ The Romantic era to be precise, began with the advent ofWilliamWordsworth publishing his Lyrical
Lyrical Ballads in 1798 and was ended by the crowning of QueenVictoria in 1839.
■ John Clare, son of a farm labourer who wrote on the issues of the countryside and on the lamentations of
lamentations of the changes that was being taken place then in rural England
■ George Crabbe is yet another poet during this period, Lord Byron is said to have admired Crabbe.

3. Anna Letitia Barbauld - a poet, essayist, educator, author of children’s
literature, devotional writer, political pamphleteer, and a
literary critic.
■ Her The British Novelists; with An Essay; and Prefaces, Biographical
and Critical has given prefaces to the works by Elizabeth Inchbald and
other writers of her times.
■ On the Origin and Progress of a Novel-Writing contradicted Samuel
Johnson’s view that novels must be serving as an educational and
moral purpose. Barbauld says that entertainment is what must be the
ultimate goal of fiction. But women writers often hid behind anonymity
and were “universally regarded as lacking in the judgement necessary
to criticism, that they never enjoyed the kind of professional literary
career that was attained by at least some men” (Waters 4).
■ But for Barbauld’s case it has been noted that “criticism appears to
have sustained her financially while providing her, according to her
niece and first biographer, with an intellectual and emotional lifeline at
the time of her husband’s mental collapse and eventual suicide”
(Waters 10).

5. • Once she was recruited to write criticism, but she disliked
writing it, yet she began to write on prefaces for individual
plays. Inchbald’s essays at first appeared as individual
instalments.
• She was attacked for stepping out of the feminine boundary,
for judging a man’s work. George Coleman was one such
person to be displeased with her assessment and had written
a sarcastic letter questioning her judgement on how she could
invade the usual man made criticism. Inchbald then gave a
witty reply by giving out her role as being a critic and on her
assessment of the work by Coleman.
• She also authored two novels A Simple Story and Nature and
Art, and both were well received.
• Thomas Longman was approached by Inchbald to pen down
introductions and she had done such in weekly instalments for
over two years which amounts to one hundred and twenty five
introductions. Her criticism includes the ironic essay On Novel
Writing. Inchbald remarks of Henry IV, Pt 1. As “a play which
all men admire, and which most women dislike” (Waters 66).

6. Maria Jane Jewsbury - wrote poems, fiction, satire, reflective
essays, and literary criticism.
■ Her first publication was a poem which appeared in a
local newspaper, which was satirical and thus began
her writing career.
■ She anonymously brought out the work
Phantasmagoria; or, Sketches of Life and Literature,
which was a two volume collection of poems, literary
sketches, and short fictions which was dedicated to
William Wordsworth. Wordsworth himself praised the
work.
■ But Jewsbury suffered from a life threatening bout of
illness, like Mary Lamb had also had. She was in the
later stages was married to William Kew Fetcher and
had sailed to India, but seven months after arriving in
Bombay she died of cholera.
■ Jewsbury talks of the writing style of Jane Austen.

7. Lucy Aikin - poet, fiction writer, children’s writer, historian,
biographer, and translator.
■ By the age of twenty she began a career both as an editor and as a children’s writer. Her first
major work of her own authorship included Epistles on Women, Exemplifying Their Character
and Condition in Various Ages and Nations: With Miscellaneous Poems, which talks of women
to be in a more equal view with men.
■ The gothic novel she wrote was Lorimer.
■ She had also reviewed the “Poems in two volumes, by William Wordsworth, Author of the
Lyrical Ballads” for the Annual Review.

8. ■ It is noted that the Romantic Era “women critics frequently praise other women writers, but they
sometimes capitalize on the occasion of reviewing one female writer to promote other women
writers” (Waters 15).
■ The Romantic Era has also several other careers too which were did by the eighteenth-century
women writers. Norma Clarke however says that most of the women writers came from the
genteel classes, for they had access to education. Most of the women critics on the other hand
came from an aristocratic statuses. Yet, still some of these women were less successful than
men.
■ The Romantic Era was also a period which brought in many changes including that of the rapid
spread of ownership of clocks with minute hands throughout the late nineteenth-century. This
period made lawyers to condemn their old sundials as childish. This is proved by the “evidence
of the new pressurized awareness of the value of time” (Aaron 56),

9. ■ This was also a period in which men writers flourished. Joseph Johnson, a radical and is one of
those persons who is to be remembered, for he had helped to make many of these texts to be
surviving today, he was the editor of the Analytical Review, which published the works of
Wollstonecraft, Lucy Aikin, and Anna Letitia Barbauld. Thomas Longman III of the Annual
Review and the journal Athenæum published the works of Maria Jane Jewsbury, and many
more journals such as these gave fame to many women writers of the Romantic Era. Yet there
are still many female writers who never had their fame glow as their male counterparts had. As
Terry Castle, an American literary scholar has found many women writers of the Romantic Era,
so has Adriana Craciun of the University of California, has created a page in the web for these
Romantic Era Women Writers (http://craciun.ucr.edu/women-romantic-era-writers/) where
details of various women romantic writers can be gathered.
■ Thus it is always advisable to see history from both sides of a coin.