Kathryn Ledbetter. British Victorian Women’s Periodicals: Beauty, Civilization, and Poetry. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. ISBN: 9780230601260. Price: US$85.00

Kathryn Ledbetter’s book presents a valuable contribution to the scholarship of British women’s periodicals in the nineteenth century. The few studies of women’s magazines to date have been broad, providing summaries or anthologies. Just as scholars have ignored women’s magazines, so they have ignored poetry in women’s periodicals dismissing it as poorly-written and frivolous space-filler. Ledbetter explores the role and purpose of poetry in women’s lives and the effects of its inclusion in periodicals designed for a female audience in nineteenth-century Britain. She argues that poetry was meant as a civilizing agent in which women readers and writers were to be the missionaries of morality, domesticity, and charity: that is, the appropriate social and gendered behavior of women as defined by the Victorian ideology of separate male and female spheres. Women’s periodicals and the poetry within them provided domestic empowerment for women isolated in the private sphere of the home. Poetry in Victorian women’s periodicals allowed women not only to be readers, but also published poets and writers. Ledbetter concludes, “the mission of poetry in Victorian women’s periodicals was to perpetuate and teach ideologies of patriotism and empire, feminine moral superiority, Christianity, philanthropy, and the appreciation of beauty, family, marriage, and love” (207). The most compelling part of Ledbetter’s argument is her focus on poetry published in women’s magazines as subversive of the gendered status quo defined by separate spheres ideology. Poetry’s emphasis on individual and private emotion situated it as a feminine avocation in the nineteenth century. But with poetry increasingly published in affordable weekly or daily magazines throughout the century, it became accessible for readers of all classes. According to Ledbetter, readers of women’s magazines learned to appreciate poetry through not only the poems themselves, but also the reviews of poems and special articles about the poets. Furthermore, female readers could become contributors to the magazine, often advised through the magazine editor’s correspondence columns. According to Ledbetter, “a deceptive confidence in separate spheres ideology may lead to a perception that such a gendered space is private, when it is actually a public space packaging private emotions, a subversive activity contradictory to the dictums of domestic ideology encoding the woman’s periodical” (13). Ledbetter admits that the ideology of separate spheres was contested by both contemporaries living in nineteenth-century Britain and by historians today. Her central argument, however, asserts the opposite and requires closer scrutiny. Although acknowledging the complexity and conflicting nature, as well as questioning the reality of separate spheres for men and women in nineteenth-century Britain, Ledbetter proceeds to argue that poetry in women’s magazines portrayed a positive feminine and domestic power centered in the home throughout the entire century. She writes, “poetry is a short-track to the ideology of its moment, existing on the pages of most women’s magazines as a prolific testament to the utility of sentiment, patriotism, domestic ideology, and traditional values” (9). Ledbetter’s claim that poetry’s focus on this traditional femininity gave women a powerful role in an otherwise oppressive position in society would gain from the insights of Patricia Branca’s Silent Sisterhood: Middle-Class Women in the Victorian Home (1975) and Elizabeth Langland’s Nobody’s Angels: Middle-Class Women and Domestic Ideology in Victorian Culture (1995). These scholars recognize that such “feminine” empowerment was limiting since women continued to be restricted within well-defined gendered boundaries; a point that Ledbetter does not address. Ledbetter seems to claim this finite focus on traditional femininity of the “Angel in the House” is accepted and embraced by women (as much as men) and continues to empower women. Is this a fair assumption? If poetry and more generally, women’s magazines, continue …