SOURCE: “In Her ‘Proper Place’: Ingelow's Fable of the Female Poet and Her Community in Gladys and Her Island,” in Victorian Poetry, Vol. 31, No. 3, Fall, 1993, pp. 227-39.

In the following essay, Wagner explores the theme of the female imagination in the allegorical Gladys and Her Island.

Eric S. Robertson's notoriously condescending “critical biography” of Jean Ingelow in his 1883 English Poetesses locates the cause of her immense popularity in her “domesticity”: “these [lyrics] deal with homely subjects described in good Saxon language. … Homeliness of subject and place are natural to Jean Ingelow.”¹ These remarks, designed to put Ingelow “in her place” as a female poet, are nevertheless interesting, for they do point to the heart—hidden perhaps to Robertson—of “the English poetess”'s psychic landscape. Like so many female writers of her century, Ingelow revealed that landscape in a poem that has been recognized as one of her...