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Augusta Webster (as she was known) published one novel, many reviews and several books of poetry, including verse plays, in the last four decades of the 19th century. An activist in social causes, she fought for women's suffrage in England; as a member of the London school Board, she championed the cause of the poor who could not pay for their children's education. Though appreciated by writers and reviewers of her day, Webster's work did not sell well and went out of print soon after her death. Because today her ironic aesthetic philosophical stance, focusing on the pain and brevity of life and avoiding moral judgment, seems current, literary critics have begun to explore her work. This bio...
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Augusta Webster was very widely praised in her own time—Christina Rossetti thought her “by far the most formidable” woman poet. Her work has again come into favour, so much so that Isobel Armstrong and her co-editors of the influential anthology, Nineteenth-Century Women Poets, declare that “there can be no doubt that Augusta Webster ranks as one of the great Victorian poets.” This collection is the first edition of Webster’s poems since 1895. It is a selection of her best work, emphasizing her powerful dramatic monologues and including a substantial number of her lyrics. With an introduction and background documents that highlight the distinctiveness of her work, this edition will help to re-establish Augusta Webster as a major figure of nineteenth-century English literature.
This book treats the literary work of Julia Augusta Webster within the context of Websters participation in nineteenth century British aestheticism. Websters personal life, her experience as a member of the Suffrage Society and her tenure on the London School Board, as well as her position as poetry reviewer for the Athenaeum and participation in the salon society of the 1880s, inform her later work, but her earliest poetry and fiction also reflect the beginnings of the aestheticist perspective on the transience and impermanence of life. This book makes use of extensive archival materials to provide context for a study of Websters literary work, beginning with her first volume of poetry Blanche Lisle and concluding with her posthumously published Mother and Daughter sonnets. In tracing the trajectory of Websters development as an aestheticist poet, Patricia Rigg extends Webster scholarship into areas of the writers work not previously explored.
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