“Lady's Greek” (With the Accents): A Metrical Translation of Euripides by A. Mary F. Robinson

Abstract

How to map women's poetry at the end of the nineteenth century was a question already posed by Vita Sackville-West in 1929, in her essay, “The Women Poets of the 'Seventies.” She speculated that the 1870s “perhaps might prove the genesis of the literary woman's emancipation,” as a time of transition when “women with a taste for literature” could follow the lead of Victorian poetesses like Elizabeth Barrett Browning, while also leading women's poetry forward into the future (111). According to Sackville-West, “Mrs. Browning” seemed an exemplary woman of letters to this generation, because “she had been taught Greek; her father had been a man of culture; and she had married a poet” (112). With the formation of women's colleges and the entry of women into higher education, however, another generation of literary women was emerging. What distinguished these new women of letters was a desire for classical education independent of fathers and husbands, demonstrating an independence of mind anxiously parodied byPunchmagazine: The woman of the future! she'll be deeply read, that's certain,With all the education gained at Newnham or at Girton;Or if she turns to classic tomes, a literary roamer,She'll give you bits of Horace or sonorous lines from Homer.Oh pedants of these later days, who go on undiscerningTo overload a woman's brains and cram our girls with learning,You'll make a woman half a man, the souls of parents vexing,To find that all the gentle sex this process is unsexing. As quoted by Sackville-West in her essay (114), this parody is an equivocal tribute to the generation of women just before her own. Although (in her estimation) the women poets of the seventies produced “nothing of any remarkable value,” nevertheless she admired their intellectual ambition: “a general sense of women scribbling, scribbling” was the “most encouraging sign of all” that the woman of the future was about to come into being, as an idea to be fulfilled by the New Woman of thefin de siècle(131).

How did Ideas about Gender Influence Women`s Entry into the British Medical Profession Prior to WWII?

“…Even if women ignored the injurious effects of medical education, they were perceived as simply incapable of withstanding the intellectual rigour of the course. An 1848 obstetrical text states, "She [woman] has a head too small for intellect but just big enough for love" [9]. From the mid 18 th century, doctors were actively seeking to climb social strata claiming that the 'esoteric form of knowledge' which they had appropriated could only be fully understood by the medical professional [10].…”

Decadent women poets: translingual thresholds

“…In Ladies' Greek, for example, Yopie Prins, has shown how women were "actively recirculating or subverting male classicism, or producing parallel classicisms." 1 This essay shifts current debates about women's decadence. It brings attention to their command of modern languages, and the way in which they negotiated their multilingualism for aesthetic and political ends.…”

Victorian Literature and the Reception of Greece and Rome

“…Recent studies have continued to examine Barrett Browning, Eliot and Harrison as pre‐eminent in the Victorian reception of Greek culture, and have also shown that their outstanding attainments in classical studies inspired other women – particularly women with literary ambitions – to study Latin and Greek (Hurst). The increasing number of women writers reassessed in the light of their readings of classical texts and myths includes Emily Pfeiffer, Florence Nightingale, A. Mary F. Robinson, Vernon Lee and Michael Field (Olverson; Monros‐Gaspar; Prins ‘Ladies’ Greek’; Evangelista; Thain). Nevertheless, the lack of a formal classical education left even the most accomplished female classicists with anxieties about the ‘inadequacy and amateurism’ of their scholarship, a vulnerability recognised by Barrett Browning in the much‐quoted phrase from Aurora Leigh , ‘lady’s Greek’ (Fiske 7; Falk ‘Lady's Greek’).…”