Gender Roles between Change and Persistence:

Charlotte Smith, Mary Robinson and Anne Barbauld all apply divergent approaches when it comes to discussing and expressing female subjectivity within the realm of gendered aesthetics. The varied approaches chosen by the three authors emphasise the problems which necessarily arise once we limit our understanding of Romantic poetry so as to only include the notion of vision and visionary flights. For women poets, gender does matter, and so does a much needed broadening of our current apprehension of romantic poetry. However, the reception of female poets into the canon of Romanticism remains far from being resolved and is highly dependenton a constant re-appropriation and re-evaluation if we really want to grant women poets the place they deserve in the complex history of the British Romantic Era.