The Princess (poem) - Background

Background

Tennyson planned the poem in the late 1830s after discussing the idea with Emily Sellwood, whom he later married in 1850. It seems to have been a response to criticism that he was not writing about serious issues. It was also a response, in part, to the founding of Queen's College, London, Britain's first college for women, in 1847. Two of Tennyson's friends were part-time professors there. Other critics speculate that the poem was partly inspired by the opening of Love's Labour's Lost and other literary works.

Tennyson is reported as saying, in the 1840s, that "the two great social questions impending in England were 'the education of the poor man before making him our master, and the higher education of women'." The women's rights movement, including the right to higher education, was still at an early stage in 1847. In Britain, the first university-level women's school, Girton College, Cambridge was not opened until 1869, more than two decades after Tennyson wrote The Princess. In A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), however, Mary Wollstonecraft had been an early advocate of the equality of men and women, and writers such as John Stuart Mill had argued for female emancipation. Nevertheless, "Tennyson was in the vanguard in writing of the subject and although feminist critics have complained about the conservative ending of his poem, he must be credited with broaching the topic and voicing some of the injustices women suffered." In The Princess, "Tennyson describes with such clarity the principal problems of feminism".

As in the case of many other Tennyson poems, The Princess is framed by a prologue and a conclusion outside of the main narrative. The description of a summer fête that opens the poem is based on a feast of the Mechanics' Institute at a country house, Park House, near Maidstone, in 1842. The narrative device is a tale of fancy composed in turn by some university undergraduates, based on an old chronicle. Though the poem was moderately successful, Tennyson wrote to a friend, saying "I hate it and so will you". He revised the work after its first publication. Some of the best-known lyrics, including "The splendour falls on castle walls" were added for the third edition (1850).