Romantic aesthetics in Mary Tighe and Letitia Landon: How women poets recuperate the gaze

Mary Tighe and Literary History: The Making of a Critical Reputation

“…Unlike many of the critics who followed, Ross highlighted the excellence of Tighe’s lyrics (notably her sonnets) over Psyche . From the 1990s forward, however, most scholars writing on Tighe focused on the contribution Psyche makes to literary history as a proto‐feminist epic: in 1991, Greg Kucich placed Psyche within the Romantic neo‐Spenserian tradition and went on to argue for the feminist significance of Tighe’s positioning Psyche as an active quester in 1995; Harriet Kramer Linkin wrote a series of essays in 1996, 1997, 1999, and 2002 championing Tighe as a powerful feminist poet who demonstrated agency through her gaze (a thesis furthered by Chris Frick and Andrea Henderson); Diego Saglia explored Tighe’s representations of luxury and identity in 1999 and 2003; Cecilia Pietropoli looked at Tighe’s transformation of romance conventions in 2002; and, beginning with John Anderson’s approach to Psyche as a Homeric epic in 1993, many critics usefully queried what kind of epic Tighe produces, such as Adeline Johns‐Putra (domestic), Elisa Beshero‐Bondar (national), Debnita Chakravarti (female), Herbert Tucker (marital), and Stephen Behrendt (community). While the majority of scholarly analyses concentrate on Psyche , an increasing number of critics have begun to consider Tighe’s lyric voice, most particularly in her sonnets (John Pipkin, Paula Feldman and Daniel Robinson, Linkin, Stuart Curran), and how a historical sensibility emerges in her shorter poems (Jim Mays on the Irish rebellion, Brian Cooney on Methodist suffering, and Julia Wright on imperialism).…”