Satire and Protest
Writing about Ellen Fitzarthur, Southey said, "You have the eye, the ear, and the heart of a poetess..." (Dowden, p. 10). Alfred H. Miles in the first decade of the last century noted that her work was neglected: it "had a greater charm for her own generation than it can ever have again. There is a natural simplicity about it which gives it a certain affinity with the so-called 'Lake school', and which was much newer in her day than it is in ours. And yet... her work still emits a sweet mild fragrance, and recalls a tender, sympathetic personality."
Her published output of five books of verse, two books of prose tales and one miscellany of mixed prose and verse have been described by the present-day scholar Anne Zanzucchi as the work of "an experimental and dexterous writer whose publications represent a range of forms: prose fiction (Chapters on Churchyards), verse satire (The Cat's Tail), dramatic monologue (Tales of the Factories), and blank verse autobiography (The Birth-day)." The last was the work in which she broke her anonymity in 1836.
Virginia H. Blain in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography notes that her "Tales of the Factories were among the earliest of that kind of protest poetry, preceding both Caroline Norton's and Elizabeth Barrett's works in the genre."
The romance of Southey and Bowles was the subject of a BBC drama, The Fly and the Eagle.
Read more about this topic: Caroline Anne Southey
Famous quotes containing the words satire and/or protest:
“For even satire is a form of sympathy. It is the way our sympathy flows and recoils that really determines our lives. And here lies the vast importance of the novel, properly handled. It can inform and lead into new places our sympathy away in recoil from things gone dead. Therefore the novel, properly handled, can reveal the most secret places of life: for it is the passional secret places of life, above all, that the tide of sensitive awareness needs to ebb and flow, cleansing and freshening.”
—D.H. (David Herbert)
“The habit some writers indulge in of perpetual quotation is one it behoves lovers of good literature to protest against, for it is an insidious habit which in the end must cloud the stream of thought, or at least check spontaneity. If it be true that le style c’est l’homme, what is likely to happen if l’homme is for ever eking out his own personality with that of some other individual?”
—Dame Ethel Smyth (1858–1944)