Thank you so much to Rupsha Banerjee for writing this illuminating blog post introducing us to four women-authored Romantic-period medievalist texts! If you would like to contribute to the blog, please email the comms team at britishassociationromantic@gmail.com. We are always excited to share short essays on any aspect of Romanticism (and Romantic receptions).
Letitia Elizabeth Landon’s silver-fork novel, Romance and Reality (1830), makes a couple of fleeting references to the legendary King Arthur and his knight Sir Lancelot, highlighting their trials to convince the protagonist (and readers) that one would do well not to be carried away by the glamour of romance. By contrast, Mary Matilda Betham’s long poem The Lay of Marie (1816), dealing with a fictional episode from the life of the twelfth-century trobairitz Marie de France, contains extensive notes on various medieval historical and legendary figures. In the introduction to Clara Reeve’s long essay, The Progress of Romance, Through Times, Countries, and Manners (1785), she explains that she was once implicitly accused by a man of fabricating Egyptian romances, which perhaps leads her to provide the ample references that she proceeds to include in the text. As I discovered in the course of researching my MA dissertation at Jadavpur University—completed in the final semester of the two-year programme under the supervision of Dr Ramit Samaddar—these differences in women writers’ approach to the medieval are not random, but products of a rich and complex relationship they cultivated with the ghosts of the past.
Why were women writers turning to medieval romances and medievalist scholarship?
While the Middle Ages had long captivated British cultural texts, as evidenced by Edmund Spenser and others, medievalism had a new impetus in the Romantic era with several discursive texts being published, including Richard Hurd’s Letters on Chivalry and Romance (1762), Thomas Warton’s Observations on the Fairy Queen of Spenser (1762), and most crucially Thomas Percy’s Reliques of Ancient English Poetry (1765), which certainly rejuvenated an interest in the past. At a time when women were beginning to publicly engage with literary discourse, a substantial body of women’s medievalism naturally followed.
This, as Katie Garner argues, was aided by the fact that most medieval texts, at least those in Middle English, were more easily accessed by women readers, unlike, say, Hellenism, which continued to dominate Romantic thought (Coleridge would dub Betham England’s ‘more fortunate Sappho’ in his poem ‘To Matilda Betham, From a Stranger’) but required a familiarity with Ancient Greek and Latin texts which was denied to women (2017: 5).
Additionally, the medievalist tradition enabled women writers to comment on current issues, such as nation-formation and gender, without facing political and/or gendered censure.
For instance, Romantic writers used medieval history and romance to fashion a sense of national identity in the rapidly changing political landscape of post-French Revolution Europe. Joanna Baillie’s 1802 plays, Ethwald I and II, set during the Heptarchy, testify to the British medieval’s suitability for this purpose. Figures associated with the Arthurian tradition, too, are similarly co-opted, as seen in Betham’s The Lay of Marie, in which the heroine navigates the fraught relationship between English and French nobility during the Battle of Normandy. These works reveal a growing interest, most importantly, in writing women into the narrative of British nation-formation (Elizabeth Deirdre Gilbert notes Baillie’s inclusion of multiple classes of women negotiating and/or influencing the wars waged actively by men). Baillie herself introduces her plays saying that, in using a distant history rather than the present, her reworking may avoid disturbing any important truths (1802: x).
The issue of gender was intrinsic to Romantic discourse on the Middle Ages. As Garner demonstrates, part of the male Romantic project of rereading Arthurian texts was to ‘regender’ the idea of romance-reading, as the genre had long been associated with female readers (2017: 3-5, 19-22). Romantic women essayists, often taking inspiration from these very scholarly works, authored their own treatises as counterpoints to this regendering, especially insofar as it insisted that women readers should not read romances. Reeve’s Progress of Romance is such a project, and a didactic one at that, as Gerd Karin Omdal identifies (2013: 693), arguing in favour of romance-reading, particularly among young people.
This view evolved even as medieval romances and their adaptations became more ubiquitous over time. Landon’s Romance and Reality, written nearly half a century after Reeve, continues to focus on the didactic value of romances, but walks a fine line between encouraging and cautioning women readers of the genre. This, as Claire Knowles observes, is rather anomalous in the silver-fork genre (2012: 253), indicating a deliberate subversion of generic expectations, aided by medieval material.
By way of a final observation, through a brief look at Romantic women’s medievalism, one may conclude that it was their works that laid a significant portion of that foundation on which the Victorian era would go on to define their own age through a medieval lens. The works of these writers capitalised on a growing popularity of the Middle Ages (be it Britain’s own historical past or fictional accounts of Arthurian and other legends) and in turn led to a literary tradition for and by women that may yet reveal much more about contemporary sensibilities.
Acknowledgements: I would like to take this opportunity to thank the Department of English at Jadavpur University, the only UGC Centre for Advanced Study in English in India, for offering the semester-long course Dissertation Writing (ENG/PG/H29) to the 2023–2025 MA batch, of which I was a student. Coordinated by Professor Paromita Chakravarti and Dr Ramit Samaddar, the course enabled me to take my first steps into the world of literary research.
Bio: Rupsha Banerjee completed her postgraduate degree at the Department of English, Jadavpur University, Kolkata, in 2025, and currently works as a part-time editor at the Jadavpur University Press. Her interests include the Middle Ages, nineteenth-century literature, myths in popular culture, and contemporary literature. She has shared her research through national and international scholarly conferences such as the International Congress on Medieval Studies and the Northeast Popular Culture Association Annual Virtual Conference (NEPCA). Alongside this, she is also a published translator and a keen lover of languages.
Bibliography
Baillie, Joanna. 1821. Ethwald: A Tragedy Parts I and II, in A series of plays: in which it is attempted to delineate the stronger passions of the mind: each passion being the subject of a tragedy and a comedy, 3 vols, ii (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme and Brown)
Betham, Mary Matilda. 1978. The Lay of Marie and Vignettes in Verse (New York and London: Garland Publishing)
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. 1802. ‘To Matilda Betham From a Stranger.’ GPI. https://gpi.dhil.lib.sfu.ca/poem/c75.html [accessed 20 June 2023]
Garner, Katie. 2017. Romantic Women Writers and Arthurian Legend: The Quest for Knowledge. (London: Palgrave Macmillan)
Gilbert, Elizabeth Deirdre. 2006. ‘Desires and History: Historical Representation in Frances Burney’s Edwy and Elgiva and Joanna Baillie’s Ethwald’, European Romantic Review, 17. 3, pp. 327-334, doi:10.1080/10509580600816777
Knowles, Claire. 2012. ‘Celebrity, Femininity and Masquerade: Reading Letitia Landon’s Romance and Reality’, European Romantic Review 23.2, pp.247–263, doi:10.1080/10509585.2012.653283
Landon, Letitia Elizabeth. 1856. Romance and Reality, in The Complete Works of L. E. Landon (Boston: Phillips, Sampson and Company)
Omdal, Gerd Karin. 2013. ‘Clara Reeve’s Progress of Romance and the Female Critic in the 18th Century’, Literature Compass, 10.9, pp. 688–695, doi:10.1111/lic3.12077
Reeve, Clara. 1930. The Progress of Romance, Through Times, Countries, and Manners and the History of Charoba, Queen of Egypt (New York: The Facsimile Text Society). Reproduced from the Colchester Edition of 1785