Generic Exceptionality

Letitia Elizabeth Landon (L.E.L.) and Elizabeth Barrett Browning (E.B.B.) achieved literary fame in the 1820s and 30s through their remarkable ability, despite educational obstacles, to imitate and translate ancient Greece. L.E.L. was renowned as the Brompton ‘Sappho’, performing in society soirées with her hair in ancient fashion like the lyric poet. Published in weekly magazines, monthly journals and annual giftbooks, which were striking for their classical ‘embellishments’ and verses on Hellenic and Philhellenic topics, her poems were regathered in anthologies and collections under antique and antiquarian titles: ‘Classical Sketches’, ‘Subjects for Pictures’, ‘Medallion Wafers’. E.B.B., meanwhile, was lauded as a teenage prodigy, the ‘author of the Battle of Marathon’ (1820), published when she was aged fourteen, and An Essay on Mind (1826), her first collection which included many Philhellenic poems. She was to go on to produce two different translations of Prometheus Bound, in 1833 and 1850, as well as Aurora Leigh (1857) with its many classical allusions.

The contemporary celebration of these two extraordinary classical ‘poetesses’ at a time when women were excluded from studying ancient Greek in educational institutions might seem paradoxical. As many literary historians have pointed out, there was a sharp gender polarity in formal classical education in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Classics constituted a form of cultural capital offering access to positions of power in the establishment. Upper-and middle-class boys and men were schooled in Latin and Greek, while women and girls might have access to some Latin through home tutors or governesses but very rarely to ancient Greek. There was, of course, no university education for women in Britain until 1869. George Eliot satirised the prevailing attitude towards female classical learning in the first half of the nineteenth century in the voice of Mr Brooke, who warns Mr Casaubon that ‘such deep studies, classics, mathematics, that kind of thing, are too taxing for a woman – too taxing, you know […] there is a lightness about the feminine mind’. Femininity seemed specifically to entail not knowing Greek. Exclusion from classical languages and a knowledge of ancient literature went hand in hand with political and social marginalisation.