Smallpiece Essay

In Search of Anna Maria Smallpiece

Stephen C. Behrendt

This essay was originally published in Women's Writing, Volume 7, Number 1 (2000), pp. 55-73.

I'm searching for Anna Maria Smallpiece, an obscure poet writing at the very end of the eighteenth century and who seems to have published only one collection, Original Sonnets, and Other Small Poems, which appeared in 1805.[1] The search is no easy one, since we know virtually nothing about Smallpiece. Her collection was reviewed three times when it appeared, and the response was tepid at best. I have discovered no further mention of her in discussions of individual writers or of the literary community dating from the period, nor do even the most detailed modern biographical and bibliographical resources offer any helpful insight. Paradoxically, this dearth of information presents us with an interesting opportunity to reconsider Smallpiece's poetry and to examine some complex aspects of her works that bear directly on issues of gender, sexuality, and authorial presence. Such issues have emerged as particularly problematic within recent scholarly efforts to recover the works of historically neglected or marginalized Romantic women writers, both in prose and in poetry. Indeed, their problematic nature — plus the implicated issues of aesthetic judgment and valuation — may in fact suggest why so many of us still hesitate to enter into the fray that swirls around examination of the aesthetics of Romantic women's poetry, a virtual and real battleground on which issues of canonicity, periodicity, and the individual poetic voice are also much in contention.

While what I wish to say here is most immediately specific to Smallpiece — and therefore also to poetry — the issues bear broader significance for us as readers, as scholars, and as theorists (with our against our wills). I want especially to examine some of the intellectual and critical complications that follow from our knowledge of the author's gender — especially if it is female — when it comes to assessing poems of the sort we find in Smallpiece's Original Sonnets. For these sonnets themselves raise issues of gender relations that are in turn unavoidably gendered. So I want to consider in particular how those gendered considerations play into the linked processes of interpretation and valuation that come into play when we approach Smallpiece's sonnets.

Let me say first what I know about Anna Maria Smallpiece; it won't take long. The first poem in her collection's second section, "Original Poems," is titled simply "Lines, written March 1, 1796" (pp. 52-53); this is the earliest occasion or date of composition recorded in the volume. Given the relative poetic immaturity of many of the poems in this second section — about which I will say a bit more shortly — I would guess that the author was still relatively young in 1796. If we assume that she was, say, sixteen in 1796, that would place her birth somewhere near 1780. In the volume’s preface she refers to Coleridge as "an interesting Author of the present day" who has "in his preface to his beautiful Poems" has "so exactly anticipated every thing that can be said on compositions resembling the following, that I have only to submit them to the Public, soliciting their indulgence for the melancholy that pervades them, which, unfortunately for the writer, has not been affected." That melancholy, she suggests, will be familiar

To those who have suffered from long sickness; to those who have stood,

Around the death-bed of their dearest friends,

And mark'd the parting anguish;

To those who have suffered by the keen sting of ingratitude. (iii)

Indeed, she says that the "effusions" which follow "may perhaps be read with kindred sympathy; as under the pressure of such feelings they have generally been written."[2]

Let's trace the reference to Coleridge. Coleridge published his Poems, on Various Subjects in 1796, followed in 1797 by a revised and expanded version entitled Poems, by S. T. Coleridge and then in 1803 by a third edition. [3] The preface to the 1796 collection was slightly revised in 1797, but both versions contain the language to which Smallpiece undoubtedly referred in 1805 in her preface. Coleridge writes:

After the more violent emotions of Sorrow, the mind demands amusement, and can find it in employment alone: but full of its late sufferings, it can endure no employment not in some measure connected with them. Forcibly to turn our attention to general subjects is a painful and most unavailing effort . . . . The communicativeness of our Nature leads us to describe our own sorrows; in the endeavour to describe them, intellectual activity is exerted; and from intellectual activity there results a pleasure, which is gradually associated, and mingles as a corrective, with the painful subject of the description. [4]

Significantly, Coleridge is writing here specifically about the composition of "Sonnets or Monodies," the composition of which, he says, "give[s] me pleasure when nothing else could." Moreover, Coleridge also notes that "by a Law of our Nature, he, who labours under a strong feeling, is impelled to seek for sympathy; but a Poet's feelings are all strong" (emphasis mine). The recurrence of "sympathy," used in much the same way by both Coleridge and Smallpiece and taken together with the comments about the restorative effects of writing about personal sorrow, suggests that Smallpiece has in mind the portion of Coleridge's preface I have cited.

What else can be determined about Smallpiece? Not much. That she knows Coleridge’s work by 1805 is not especially surprising, since he was an emerging poet. It is also vaguely possible that a geographical link exists between the two. In one of the "Original Poems," "To the River Tamar in Cornwall," Smallpiece refers to the "stream belov'd, whose silver tide / So oft arrests my wand'ring feet" (ll. 1-2; my emphases). If she often visits the river, which enters the sea at Plymouth and lies between Devon and Cornwall, this would place her in the southern part of an area frequented by Coleridge before his trip to Germany and subsequent removal to the Lake District. Another poem also located in the southwest, "Composed on a Rock that Overhangs the Sea at Whitsands in Cornwall," further indicates her familiarity with the region.

But other poems on or about particular places fail to provide the additional evidence that would let us place Smallpiece so neatly in that part of England. Two poems cite Woburn, for instance, and two geographical locations bear the name (which means "crooked stream" or "winding brook"): one is in Surrey and the other in Bedfordshire. [5] J. R. de Jackson deduces from the internal evidence of these two sonnets that Smallpiece "evidently grew up in Woburn., Beds." [6] In the leave-taking Sonnet 5 ("To Woburn Evergreens"), she remarks about her "parting anguish" that she is "doom'd, alas! To take the sad farewel [sic], / No more to wander through your hallow'd grove." Sonnet 21 ("Composed on a Journey to Woburn") identifies Woburn as the locale of "shades belov'd, unalter'd" that make up the residence of "the kindred friends I love," and which place "recall[s] the fleeting days of youth." The sense of returning to a familiar locale after a considerable absence lends credence to Jackson's tentative suggestion. Woburn is in fact a parish in the west of Bedfordshire, bordering on Buckinghamshire. And while the records for neither Bedfordshire nor Buckinghamshire contain any reference to Anna Maria Smallpiece, one entry for Buckinghamshire reveals that one Rebecca Smallpiece married Samual [sic] Cook at Eton, Bucks, on 26 December 1801. This tantalizing bit of information at least establishes the surname within relevant parameters of time and place, even if it tells us nothing further about Anna Maria Smallpiece.

Still, taken together with the references to the West country and to other geographical locations, one gets the impression that Smallpiece had some experience of travel. Another sonnet, for instance, is written "On Leaving Wokingham" (which means "homestead of the people or dependents of Wocca" and which is also in Bedfordshire); another mentions Aspley Wood (one of the three identifiable Aspley Woods in England is also in Bedfordshire); while two poems, one to Muswell Hill and another referring to St. Paul's Churchyard, involve locales in the greater London area. The reference to St. Paul's Churchyard is itself something of a tease, given that in 1805 the publisher Joseph Johnson — who published Smallpiece's volume — was located at No. 72, St. Paul's Churchyard.

About Smallpiece's literary relations we can establish at least some few facts. Smallpiece exhibits some considerable literary sophistication on the whole. Her title-page bears an epigraph from the Scot James Beattie's unfinished long poem, The Minstrel, the first part of which had appeared in 1771. That she also knows the poems of Ossian is evident from "Malvina's Dream," which she indicates is "Imitated from Ossian" (pp. 56-57). Sonnet 40, "To Miss Williams, on Reading Her Sonnet to the Strawberry," responds to the poem that appeared in Helen Maria Williams’ Paul and Virginia (1796), translated from the popular and widely-available French work by Jacques-Bernardin-Henri de St. Pierre. [7] Smallpiece's sonnet indicates her awareness of Williams' expatriate status in France, "from your native fields, now far away" (l. 2), a situation that forms something of an analogy for the virtual psychological self-exile Smallpiece portrays in her own sonnets. Her knowledge of the contemporary French literary context extends as well to the popular French pastoral romance, Estelle, published by Jean Pierre Claris de Florian (1755-1794) in 1788 and repeated in numerous new editions (including an English translation in 1805) [8] and which Smallpiece commemorates in "Imitated from Estelle" (pp. 64-65). Moreover, Smallpiece herself demonstrates some facility with French, including in her collection one longish poem in that language imitating an ode to the River Tamise in France ("Imitation de l'Ode a la Tamise"; pp. 72-76), as well as a passage in French at the conclusion of her brief Preface (Il est permis à un cœur blessé par la tristesse d’en peindre les effets; "It is permitted to a wounded heart to bear [or represent] the effects of sadness").

Most intriguing is a poem near the end of the volume that is called "Lines, written in Wardsworth's Poems." This does not seem to be William Wordsworth, who published no volume called Poems until 1807 and whose second edition of Lyrical Ballads, with Other Poems (1800) is in two volumes and does not in any event entirely square with the tone of the volume Smallpiece describes and which she refers to in the singular ("Dear book," p. 169). I have been unable to trace any poet by this name, although "Wardsworth" may possibly be the equally elusive poet ("happy Bard") "R. W. W. Esq." who is the addressee of the dedicatory sonnet that opens the set of "Original Sonnets." [9] Smallpiece knows this poet well enough to praise and emulate him, and indeed also to submit her work to him and to receive his approbation ("on her graceless line thy bounty show'rs, / Since not unpleas'd thou read'st her untaught lays"). Given that "Lines, written in Wardsworth's Poems" is quite clear about there being a book, and that Wardsworth must therefore have published at least something, this puzzle may yet yield a solution, one that may help eventually to identify Smallpiece's locale and literary milieu and therefore lead us to more information about her.

We would know even more if we could determine the identity of the "Maria D——tt" to whom a dedication page declares that "these poems are inscribed, as a tribute of the affectionate friendship and grateful esteem of The Author." Several of the poems mention a "Maria" who appears to be a friend and confidante from whom the poems' dramatic logic suggests that Smallpiece is separated: for example, in Sonnet 19 ("Evening") Smallpiece laments,

Ah! dear Maria, as I touch the chord

With languid hand, devoid of tuneful pow'r,

I think, how sweet thy numbers would accord

With the calm beauties of this peaceful hour. (ll. 5-8)

This may be the same "Maria" who is thanked by name in one of the "Original Poems" ("To a Friend, who wrote me some lines in Winter, which she called a Winter's Nosegay"). It appears that Smallpiece participated in something of a literary community, in fact, one that included "Wardsworth" and "Maria," with both of whom she seems to exchange verses. Moreover, the fact that several of the "Original Sonnets" are about poetry and the writing of poetry (especially numbers 1, 7, 19, and 45) suggests that her self-awareness as a poet was considerable, a point that ought to remind us of the other collection of sonnets that had made such a considerable popular impression in the preceding decade, Mary Robinson's Sappho and Phaon (1796). [10]

So much for the detective work, which takes us only so far — and that not nearly as far as I'd like to go. I want to turn now to the poems themselves, where I will concentrate on the strongest and most intriguing group, the fifty-one "Original Sonnets." Let me say first, however, that the poems in Smallpiece's collection exhibit a remarkable division of technical skill, rhetorical sophistication, and psychological acuteness. Original Sonnets, with Other Small Poems consists of two parts, the first of which is made up of 51 sonnets, covering the first 51 pages of the book. The remaining section, which bears the running head "Original Poems," comprises the remaining 126 pages of the book, followed by several pages of notes. One contemporary reviewer, surmising that the author was quite young, advised her to publish no more of her poetry. The advice is short and far from sweet:

To encourage young authors when, consistently with our duty, encouragement can be given, is always gratifying to our feelings. Glad should we be could we now indulge ourselves in the language of praise. This, however, we cannot do. We hope the authoress of this volume will forgive us for the harshness of our advice, but, even should she refuse her forgiveness, we must advise her, seriously advise her, to renounce all expectation of ever being considered as a favourite of the Muses. [11]

It is not hard to understand the basis for this verdict, particularly if one considers only those poems in the "Original Poems" section. These are for the most part stilted, amateurish productions; many of them read like "exercise poems." They take a variety of forms, too, including the sentimental ballad (e. g., "Alonzo," pp. 131-37, or "Maria," pp. 170-73), the imitation ("Malvina's Dream: Imitated from Ossian," pp. 56-57, or "Imitated from Estelle," pp. 64-65), the translation ("Translated from the French," pp. 142-43), the beast fable ("The Robin to His Mate in Winter," pp. 118-21), the verse epistle ("To a Gentleman who expressed his Intention of Renouncing Poetry," pp. 138-41), the elegy ("To the Memory of Mrs. Sandys," pp. 110-12), the epigram ("On Some Faded Flowers given Me by a Friend," p. 109), and even a remarkable epithalamium that alternates passages of soaring Spenserian pentameter archaisms with briefer passages of sentimental tetrameter verse cast in a clearly contemporary idiom ("Epithalamium for a Friend," pp. 86-90). This latter poem, with its interesting juxtaposition of different poetic types, is in fact one of the strongest and most inventive creations among the "Original Poems." While it really does merit the label of "original," especially in terms of its technical conception, the "Epithalamium" is nevertheless not directly relevant to the discussion of the sonnets I want to pursue here. Nor for that matter are the poems in this larger section of the book generally, although I shall refer to them occasionally for the light they may shed on the fifty-one sonnets that make up the "Original Sonnets."

Original Sonnets, and Other Small Poems received only three brief reviews. The one already quoted is the harshest it its total rejection of Smallpiece’s efforts. More generous is the commentary by the reviewer in the General Review of British and Foreign Literature, who couches his criticisms within the allowances he claims to make for the author's relative youth: "This lady has shown that she possesses imagination and sensibility; but her poetical taste is not yet sufficiently matured to give her the power of writing cultivated poetry, or even such poetry as shall not frequently offend from defect of language and of measure."[12] Indeed, this critic faults Smallpiece primarily for incorrect versification, by which infelicity he claims she sins against the propriety of the sonnet form. Given that he is writing in 1806, it is interesting to note that this reviewer cites as exemplars of the sonnet measure the "beautiful productions of Milton, Charlotte Smith, and others" (91). Interestingly, Milton and Smith are the two authors that Wordsworth identified as most influential for his own sonnets of 1802 and after; [13] for Wordsworth, they represented the "masculine" and "feminine" sonnet paradigms respectively, and their presence here attests to their presence and influence on contemporary aesthetics with respect to the sonnet. The well-known Melancholy that pervades the poems in Smith's popular Elegiac Sonnets, and Other Poems, which had seen some nine editions by 1806, is characteristic of the widespread appeal of sensibility in poetry of the period, and in women's shorter poems in particular. [14] Indeed, the General Review's critic observes the relevance of that lens of sensibility to poems of this sort, remarking at the very beginning of his essay that "sonnets and other short poems have ever been considered as compositions requiring all the sensibility of highly cultivated genius" (90; my emphases). The linkage of sensibility and cultivated genius here is significant, for this critic clearly expects that such poems should disply all the craft and virtuosity of miniatures:

In these compositions, if the thought be not simple, entire, and in a certain respect pointed; if the language deviate in the smallest degree from elegance and precision; if the numbers be not varied and melodious; or if there be the slightest sacrifice to unskilfulness or indolence in the structure of the verse, – the jewel is flawed, and its value disappears. (90)

Note: "disappears" — not just "diminishes." Flaws of any sort are fatal to poems of this sort, in other words, and the poet who would write them must be up to these stricter demands.

It is on precisely this rock that the third reviewer wrecks Smallpiece's poetic vessel. The longest review of Original Sonnets, and Other Small Poems appeared in The Literary Journal in March 1806. This journal had begun as a general cultural review but by 1806 was devoted exclusively to contemporary writing (which included both literature and moral, scientific, political, and economic texts) with an emphasis on "serious literature" and an increasingly strong slant toward erudite readers well versed in the classical languages and interested in philology and textuality. [15] Strongly moralistic in tone, perhaps reflecting the Utilitarian orientation of its founding editor James Mill, The Literary Review seldom commented approvingly of fiction or poetry, and it regularly railed against what it regarded as the deplorable fashion for sensibility in literature. The reviewer's contemptuous treatment of Smallpiece is therefore not surprising:

She weeps over a rose, sighs over a lily, bewails the tree in St. Paul's Churchyard, and is particularly pathetic on a periwinkle. She apostrophizes a tear, breathes the language of tenderness in the character of a robin; and having be-wept not only man and beast, but even woods, hills, valleys and rivers, and even the sun, moon, and stars, drops a tear of sensibility over dear sensibility itself!(329)

This is, of course, rhetorical "overkill," and it faults the poet for doing precisely what had proven successful for contemporaries like Anna Seward and, most notably, Charlotte Turner Smith, both of whom had turned the poetry of Sensibility into something of a virtuoso sub-genre.

While the reviewer finds Smallpiece's verse "in general tolerably smooth," his critical teeth are set on edge by her grammar, "which our authoress seems to sacrifice without scruple to her rhyme" (329). The criticism is valid, in fact; in a number of places Smallpiece deliberately violates the agreement of number and occasionally of tense. As the reviewer observes, "Surely some friend might have been procured to mend the grammar, and save the authoress from the ridicule of such ignorance" (330). That so many "uncorrected" errors remains is doubly curious, and it suggests that they are not "errors" or indications of either carelessness or ignorance at all but instead deliberate deviations from conventional formal practice. Indeed, Jerome McGann has written that for the poet who aspires to the most effective variety of emotional expression, "'Writing Incorrectly' becomes a sine qua non" that frees language from the "embrained corruption" of conventional poetic usage. [16] McGann's comments come in his discussion of the anonymous female author of a poem called "On being Charged with Writing Incorrectly" (1734). Precisely apropos of the present discussion are her poem's opening lines:

I'm incorrect: the learned say

That I write well, but not their way. (ll. 1-2)

If we need further evidence that Smallpiece's "errors" are more likely calculated deviations, we may find it in the fact that Smallpiece appears to have taken pains to rectify simple printer's errors: her book contains an errata page that specifically repairs some dozen and a half inaccuracies of exactly this sort while also directing the reader to substitute the correct possessive "its" for all the many occurrences of the incorrect "it's."

Interestingly, the reviewer seems well aware of his own critical crabbiness, observing with barely concealed contempt that "Mrs. Anna Maria Smallpiece will, however, no doubt comfort herself for these observations by reflecting that we can assuredly have no poetical taste nor sensibility. If the poems before us display any of these qualities, we are happy to own ourselves devoid of them" (330). It is an interesting, revealing comment, suggesting that this reviewer — undoubtedly like many of his contemporaries — was well aware of the nature of the hostility he brought to works of this sort. His comment (I have presumed from the history of The Literary Journal that the reviewer is male, whether he is Mill or not) also supplies in advance what must have been a familiar defense raised by authors attacked on similar premises: the notion that the critic is simply devoid of sensibility and is therefore unable to value the works for what they are and for what they seek to "do."

And this brings us to perhaps the key issue for this present examination of Smallpiece’s poems: that of expectation, execution, and valuation. As has been noted recently even by The Chronicle of Higher Education, matters of aesthetics and valuation are re-emerging — after something of a forced absence occasioned by the rather different agendas of poststructuralist theory — as part of the discourse that addresses poetry, poetics, and poetic practice, with the result that scholars "have begun to talk again about the joys and pleasures of good, powerful — even beautiful — writing."[17] This is, nevertheless, still as delicate a subject as it was two centuries ago, albeit for slightly different political reason. For — in Romantics studies and elsewhere — issues of valuation are inextricably involved with longstanding conceptions of canonicity and periodicity that have been interrogated and even overturned by the work of scholars who, in the past decade especially, have recovered works and authors historically marginalized and have required us to consider the light they shed upon our received notions about value, period, genre, and aesthetic judgment. This salutary process has produced some predictable results. Some have maintained that the canon is still the canon, and that any revision can be only a matter of minor grafting upon this main plant. Others would jettison the canon entirely but then set up a new canon in its place, producing a sort of grisly reverse cloning that fails to remedy anything but only perpetuates the flawed paradigm. Still others have taken the largely postmodern position that "anything goes," and that it is both impossible and unconscionable to try to formulate lists, criteria, or judgments.

And yet our experience of a work like Smallpiece's Original Sonnets (leaving aside the "other small poems") requires us to make judgments, and in doing so to confront our own critical assumptions and aesthetic preconceptions. I want to explore first the tricky question of what we expect, assume, or "know" as readers when we come to several of these sonnets knowing only that their author is female. What do we bring to the work, in other words, that we can say is directly related to our expectations about gender and about what we "expect" a woman writer to say and do in her verse?

Let us consider Sonnet 9:

The tender flow'ret, nursling of the morn,

That flaunted gaily in the noontide ray,

Oft bows its head beneath night's 'whelming storm,

Embraces earth, and slowly dies away.

So sinks the bosom by sharp misery torn,

When Hope, enchantress of the soul! is fled,

When friends long lov'd are gone, and we forlorn

Are left to weep o'er their cold earthy bed.

Slow winds the silver stream adown the lawn,

And the wide prospect opens with the day,

As it had wont; but ah! I weeping mourn,

That she, with whom enraptur'd I did stray,

Sleeps in the grave, and I must still deplore,

Till that sad trembling heart can beat no more.

This sonnet treats several of the themes that run through the Original Sonnets and make them function very much like a sonnet sequence, even though they are never identified as such nor are we ever explicitly invited to regard them in that fashion. [18] Again and again in the sonnets, for instance, we encounter the subjects of memory or remembrance (sonnets 12, 16, 17, 21, 36, 40, 41, 43, 44), "loss" (10, 15, 16, 17, 26, 33, 41), and presumed or actual death (8, 11, 13, 15, 16, 20, 22, 26, 36) — this latter involving both friends and acquaintances and, most important, the individual identified in Sonnet 9 as "she, with whom enraptur'd I did stray." The unusual strength of that word — "enraptur'd"— helps focus us on the issue of the author's sex. Do we read this passage differently, knowing that the author is female, than we would if the author were male? Were the author male, the language might seem the stuff of chivalry and masculinist hyperbole, and therefore something of a "given." To what extent does our knowledge that the author is female, though, prompt us to read that particularly strong word differently, perhaps overcoding it with a hint of a same-sex relationship? Indeed, does not the mere fact that this question may occur at all — to us or to Smallpiece's contemporary readers — signal the extent to which both reading and our individual awareness of how we do it as a man or a woman are themselves thoroughly (and perhaps irreversibly) gendered?

Of course, such language need not seem particularly uncommon for a particularly strong relationship that has been broken by the untimely death of one of the partners, and several of the sonnets treat in further detail Smallpiece’s relation to this lamented friend; sonnet 16, for instance, inscribed "to the memory of a friend," recounts the author’s last moments with her dying friend, and "the last sigh that wing'd thy soul to peace" (l. 3). Still, knowing that there was a Rebecca Smallpiece who married in late 1801 raises the intriguing possibility that she may be the subject of these poetic meditations on loss. What if this dead woman were a sibling of the author, a blood relative, rather than otherwise? How might that knowledge further overcode our reading of these poems and the interpresonal relationships they document?

But let us consider another sonnet, number 10, "To Sleep":

O! why, soft sleep, do I thy aid implore?

For though awhile, to this deluded breast,

Thy dreams the image of my friend restore,

I wake from the fair picture thou hast dress'd,

And to my silent pillow vainly grieve

That the fond phantom flies at morning's light,

And I no more the fancied bliss receive,

Or hear her soothing voice with sweet delight.

Yet flatt'ring power, wrapt in thy dark arms

I oft enjoy thee, though I sadly find,

Like the false friend, thou quick withdraw'st thy charms

When grief's hard pressure wastes the tortur'd mind.

But ah! how lovely do thy joys appear,

When tired infants court thee with a tear.

Here the pose of melancholy waking is counterposed to the pleasant but vexing bliss of sleep, during which respite the dreamer finds her friend — or at least her friend's image — restored, only to have it snatched away when she awakens. Smallpiece's powerful imaging of Sleep, however, is especially interesting. There is an unusual strength and sensuousness in the poet's description of how "wrapt in thy dark arms / I oft enjoy thee." The embrace seems particularly sensual here, and the verb "enjoy" consequently takes on an added force that clearly verges on the frankly sexual. Moreover, there is little precedent for the image of Sleep's dark arms. Neither the corpulent winged child Morpheus, god of sleep, nor his master Somnus are typically depicted as dark, although the cave of the latter is dark and sunless and Somnus himself is usually represented as asleep on a feather-bed with black curtains. [19] Again, the question is whether we read and react to such an image differently when we know its author is female. I would argue that, yes, indeed we do, and that our doing so plays a significant part in our aesthetic judgment of the passage and of the poem.

That is, if any reader's ascription of "value" (however defined) involves judgments about the author's choices and treatment of image, language, tone, and other poetic factors, then we need to acknowledge how thoroughly and inevitably we have been "programmed" by our entire cultural milieu to read and respond in particular and relative fashion to the diverse verbal stimuli we encounter in poems. Acknowledging this fact implies, in turn, crediting too the preexistence of codes of reading — and codes of writing — that govern both the composition of poems and the reading (or consumption) of those artifacts. These codes themselves are necessarily reinforced by a variety of cultural assumptions and expectations, among which are gender ones. What makes the image of Sleep so striking — or the designation of the poet's relationship with the lost friend as "rapture" — is the extent to which these textual phenomena fail to conform to our expectations of how writing of this sort should "behave." All such violations of expectations may be regarded by one party or the other as breaches of the etiquette or decorum that is assumed to govern communication. The actual or even potential violation of feminine decorum, Marlon Ross has pointed out, "is intrinsic to the procedure of early female poetry-writing,"[20] which "early" period certainly includes that of English Romanticism. These expectations of decorum are of course the cumulative result of countless reading (and writing) acts that have established the "pathways" (or paradigms) by which we recognize — if not what conforms, then certainly what differs. This may be one reason why Smallpiece's three print critics insisted on commenting primarily on the "other small poems," whose poetic behavior could most easily be measured against familiar protocols of poetry by women, and why they largely ignored the really superior performances of the sonnets except for matters of grammar and mechanics that permitted them literally to ignore the actual content of the writing.

The expectations that readers brought to Smallpiece's sonnets in 1805 were unquestionably gendered ones. Especially given the enormous success of Charlotte Smith’s Elegiac Sonnets, which had seen nine increasingly large editions by 1800, the mode of the contemporary sonnet had been established, as Stuart Curran has observed, as one of "pensive contemplation, mostly sorrowful, at times lachrymose," so that in the 1790s in particular "sonnets of sensibility flooded forth like tears."[21] McGann has remarked that the peculiar force of the Elegiac Sonnets comes from the fact that they are not in fact elegies for any particular person(s) but are, rather, meditations on a general condition. [22] The character of sensibility they express directly foreshadows that which we find in Smallpiece's "Original Sonnets," where the elegiac material is generalized and diffused — even, paradoxically, in those moments (and those sonnets) that seem most explicitly tied to particular times, places, individuals, and incidents. Curran notes that among Charlotte Smith's signal achievements was the fact that in her sonnets she largely freed the established poetic discourse from its longstanding reliance upon "polished couplets, formal diction, and public utterances."[23] This greater flexibility with the rules of poetic composition was seemingly justified, in terms of style, on the grounds that the poetry of sensibility ostensibly granted the poet far greater latitude because of the heightened emotional state that informed the poetry. Such a claim is of course largely smoke and mirrors, for no matter how "emotional" a poem may appear to be, the poet is nevertheless the controlling intellect who makes the choices that produce the poem and who fashions the vehicle of all this sensibility in a wholly systematic, straightforward, and calculated fashion with an eye firmly fixed on her (or his) own assumptions and expectations about how readers read. In other words, like all literary activity, the transaction between a poet like Smith (or Smallpiece) and her reader necessarily involves open eyes on the part of both partners, even when each pretends to be wholly "thoughtless" and uncalculating in design and execution. This is why Isobel Armstrong is accurate in her observation that "the gush of the feminine is a fallacy," since when one attends to the analytical power the informs both the content and the composition of women's poetry during the Romantic period, "the intricacy and self-consciousness . . . become almost self-evident."[24]

Let me return to the imagery of arms to make another point about Smallpiece's sonnets. I said earlier that although the sonnets are not a sequence in the conventional sense, they are intricately interlinked. This deliberately engineered intertextuality is in fact one of the most compelling aesthetic aspects of the Original Sonnets, considered as a whole. The image of Sleep's "dark arms" in Sonnet 9, immediately following a sonnet lamenting the friend's death, is echoed later in Sonnet 27, which itself follows immediately after the sonnet "composed in the chamber of a dying friend" (Sonnet 26):

Not to the vulgar, not the common eye,

Thy worth, dear friend, will hastily unfold,

But souls who thirst for sympathy's soft sigh,

And wish their sorrows to remain untold,

On thy calm breast may pillow their deep woes,

And feel thy tear sweet as the Ev'ning dew,

That to the fever'd low reclining rose

Does grateful fragrance and gay tints renew.

Not fiction's pencil, that in colours bright

Paints glowing virtues to the senseless heart,

Now leads the muse — But oh! the soft delight

Thy friendship faithful does to life impart,

Prompts the pure lay — I feel its soothing charms,

I fly from sorrow to thy circling arms.

Here Smallpiece sets out several contrasts that resonate throughout the fifty sonnets: the contrast between faithless and faithful friends (who are mirrored at the beginning in the "vulgar," "common" persons and those "souls who thirst for sympathy's soft sigh"), between the woes of the speaker and of others and the comfort of the addressee's "calm breast" that pillows "their deep woes," between the languishing and blighted ("fever'd") rose and its renewed condition in the addressee's presence, between the fiction of imagined virtues and the fact of the addressee's known virtues, and between the speaker's own anguish and the "soothing charms" she finds in her friend. The "circling arms" with which the poem concludes must certainly indicate another person, and given the referents within the poem and immediately preceding it we are again encouraged to conclude that person is female.

The ambivalence of "its" in the penultimate line of Sonnet 27 is characteristic of Smallpiece's procedure in the sonnets. The seeming inexactitude (and actual multivalence) of the reference is surely deliberate, given that the same sort of ambivalent reference occurs at critical points in a number of the poems. In this instance, the possessive pronoun refers us back at once to the poet's song ("the pure lay") and to the "friendship faithful" of the addressee, which soothes and renews the speaker just as it does, a few lines before, the rose. What makes this poem — like numerous others in the collection — so effective (and affecting) for a reader is the manner in which Smallpiece mediates the relationships among what is clearly an intimate, private relationship and a poem (or series of them) in which that relationship is troped in a variety of ways that at once particularize and universalize the poet's experience for the reader, in the process generating an aesthetic distance that the poem simultaneously enforces and transgresses (or transcends). One of the achievements of the Romantic writers generally, Marlon Ross has observed, is the fact that in popularizing and legitimizing the idea that poetry is the realm of private experience and personal affection they perhaps unintentionally authorized women to "view themselves as legitimate poeticizers of their own experience."[25] Owing to their historically accepted status as expressions of the poet's individual voice, a tradition rooted in Renaissance poetics, sonnets seemed — especially as they were taken up by women poets of the early Romantic period — to offer "no improper vehicle for a single sentiment" (my emphases), as Charlotte Smith put it, and as both Coleridge and Smallpiece seconded her in their prefaces, cited earlier. [26] Such poems, according to Smith, were especially suited, because of their relative brevity, to expressions of melancholy and the particular sensations associated with melancholy. In common with much of the writing we associate with sensibility, they tend at once to formulate and to manifest "an ethics of loss and suffering" that produces at least the appearance (or the semblance) of "moral urgency."[27] And yet the sonnet is a fiercely demanding and highly "regular" poetic form that everywhere calls attention to itself and to its formal artifice. This fact supports Jennifer Wagner’s claim that the nineteenth-century sonnet came to be perceived increasingly as a "natural" poetic form that was "highly self-reflective and disconnected to social concerns."[28]

But if the sonnet was disengaged from "social concerns" at the level of subject, the form itself was nevertheless a site of social interaction by virtue of its function as a site of reading activity. In this respect, sonnets are perhaps uniquely poised between the private and the public, between their authors and their readers. Smallpiece’s sonnets balance on the shifting boundary between the intensely private effusion of unregulated sentimentality and the thoroughly public articulation of the intellectualized aesthetic object — the published poem. That this is so reminds us that there are two perhaps inextricably related questions questions here: (1) What is the significance ("value") of the personal experience recorded in the sonnets? and (2) what is the aesthetic value of the consciously fabricated, public works of art by means of which the author communicates that experience to her reader(s)? The old aesthetic bogey-question, Is it good? is clearly inadequate to the needs of questions such as these, for all considerations of the aesthetically "good" necessarily founder on the rocks of culturally overdetermined notions of what is "good." Perhaps "effective" is the better word, for that choice at least permits us to begin to evaluate the individual work within a set of relative and relevant parameters.

By "effective," in the particular context of the present discussion, I mean to suggest a work's capacity successfully to create and sustain in a reader a sensory, emotional, moral, and aesthetic response that is at once emotionally engaging (or affecting) and intellectually satisfying — a response the permits and indeed encourages at the same instant both engagement and detachment. A work, in other words, in which formal features of language, lineation, imagery and thematic materials reveal a deliberate, sophisticated authorial artistry that co-exists with — indeed enhances and reinforces — the moral, intellectual, and psychological complex that constitutes the ultimately inexpressible "signified" for which the poem as total performative linguistic entity — as Gesamtkunstwerk — constitutes the nearest analogue the print medium is capable of providing.

Judged in this light, Smallpiece's sonnets must surely be reckoned effective. Moreover, substituting "effective" for "good" permits us better to assess matters of stylistic (and artistic) consistency and overall design as well as more particularized matters of the treatment of individual images, motifs, and themes. It also enables us to consider the point that I have raised several times about the interrelation of the poems in the Original Sonnets. Predecessors like Smith (in Elegiac Sonnets), Anna Seward (Original Sonnets on Various Subjects; 1799), and others had already established the collection of sonnets as a flexible format for interrelated though not necessarily strictly sequential poems. Unlike Mary Robinson's Sappho and Phaon, in a Series of Legitimate Sonnets (1796), which really was a determinate sequence, the collections by Smith, Seward, and Smallpiece drew strength from the intertextuality of their component poems, and from the increasingly complex interrelations among subjects, themes, images, and language that emerge as one studies the text.

One is struck, on rereading the Original Sonnets, by the artsitry with which Smallpiece weaves together in the poems a complex texture that goes well beyond the mere conventions of the sentimental melancholy set-piece. I have already indicated some of Smallpiece's recurrent themes and images; others include the themes of separation (Sonnets 5, 6, 8, 20, 36, 38, 46), "friendship" (11, 13, 15, 20, 27, 31, 38, 44, 51), "sympathy" in the Humean sense of empathetical experience (3, 14, 15, 29, 42); images of the moon (26, 28, 42) and roses (11, 18, 27, 31, 49); as well as the subject of poetry itself and the writing of poetry (1, 7, 19,45). The complex intertextuality of this fabric of reference lends the collection a cumulative power and pathos that much exceeds the mere sum of the individual poems. Indeed, the effect is analogous to that which one experiences in studying Blake's Songs of Innocence and of Experience, where the force of the individual poems is enhanced by their interaction with the other poems in the collection.

One additional set of interconnections in the Original Sonnets returns us to the considerations of both gender and aesthetics we have been exploring, and I should like to conclude with these. The subject is that of "false friends" (Sonnets 10, 21, 24, 33, 34, 35, 47, 49, and 51) and the related one of unrequited or false love (18, 21, 34, 47, 48, 49). As may be seen from the sonnet numbers for all the themes I have discussed, including these, they tend to recur in "clusters," the near proximity of the several poems in each cluster adding additional resonance to each. In the case of this final theme, Smallpiece juxtaposes genuine friendship and false through her observations on the truncated relationship with the dead friend whose absence is so powerfully felt and the abortive relationships the speaker has experienced with others. Sonnet 34 is perhaps the most revealing

The veil's remov'd, the gaudy, flimsy veil,

That shrowded thy false heart, and now I see,

With friendship pure, it never beat for me.

Fool! that I was, to listen to the tale.

Well, be it so — this pleasure must prevail,

Though at thy falshood [sic] much my heart has greiv'd,

Thou canst not say, I e'er thy hopes deceiv'd.

This still my solace; should all others fail,

What now remains of life I will employ

In bliss less fragile; Nature's charms sublime,

Her hills and woodlands wild, reechoing joy,

Her blushing Spring, and Summer's flow'ry prime,

Though Winter for awhile her sweets destroy,

They still return, on wings of faithful time.

Notice here Smallpiece's clever play on "faithful" in the final line, which concludes her resolve to abandon human attachment and revert instead to Nature's sustaining charms. More so than in the other sonnets on false friendships, this one hints at a broken male-female relationship (there is in this respect an interesting parallel with "Composed in a Wood beside the Water," from the "Original Poems," which laments "faithless friends, the flatt'rers of an hour; / Who woo, then leave you to return no more" [p. 116]). The rhetoric of the first four lines, in particular, reflects that of innumerable heterosexual disappointments — in literature and outside it — while line 7 ("Thou canst not say, I e'er thy hopes deceiv'd") bears a comparable strain of courtship ritual. What is especially interesting in Smallpiece's references to false friendship is their vehemence: one encounters a very real sense of determination to avoid human relationships rather than again risk betrayal. Indeed, the final lines of the final sonnet imply that all such relationships are at an end:

— Ah! idle dreams, by rude experience taught,

Rare is the treasure of a faithful friend;

E'en life itself, consuming at this thought,

Drags its long chain, and languishes to end.

For e'en the self depending soul must bend

'Neath cold neglect, where it warm friendship sought. (p.51)

Finally, we can go back to Sonnet 34 to observe Smallpiece's inventive treatment of the sonnet form, which here adheres to the Italian form while overlaying that form with a grammatical and syntactical suppleness that runs the sentences across the formal divisions signaled by the rhyme scheme, setting up what appears to be a deliberate aesthetic effect of surface tension. The entire set of sonnets is in fact characterized by a remarkable inventiveness with the sonnet form, with Smallpiece ranging over English and Italian sonnet forms alike, and varying her rhyme schemes (and indeed, often, the rhymes themselves) and her line divisions with surprising confidence. In this, as in many other respects, Smallpiece's Original Sonnets reveal a poet whose powers were considerable. From a distance of nearly two centuries we can only wonder what might have been the result had her collection met with greater critical approval, and had the merits of the Original Sonnets been assessed objectively and on appropriate aesthetic grounds. Anna Maria Smallpiece — a poet who comes to us as an "unknown" and who recedes from view immediately after publishing her only volume —represents only a single poet among the many women active during the Romantic period, but her example is full of significance for our activity as readers, scholars, and theorists. For while we continue to search for the persons of many of these women, we need in the meantime — and afterward — to rethink how we may best disentangle our complicated, culturally grounded and gendered expectations as readers so that we may formulate new aesthetics and criteria of valuation that will permit us and our successors to respond in more appropriate fashion to their newly recovered works. Indeed, we owe it to them.