There has been no comparative study of women’s poetry across linguistic and national boundaries in this period. This is due primarily to the difficulty of finding a single scholar with the appropriate linguistic expertise and literary interest across the Anglophone, Irish, Scottish and Welsh contexts of women’s writing, but also a result of the disciplinary division between the study of Celtic and Anglophone literatures and cultures. The primary aim of this project is thus to cross these linguistic and disciplinary boundaries to understand for the first time the ways in which women’s poetic production operated and survived in multiple geographical locations and comparative linguistic and cultural contexts.

By engaging in the archival recovery of women poets and presenting this in an anthology, the over-arching aim of the project is to provide a revisionary account of women’s poetic activity which. By focusing on national comparison and contrast rather than primarily gender-inflected women’s literary history, the project seeks to overturn the critical commonplaces current in the field of early women’s writing and to construct an exciting new research model which will revolutionise the way in which women’s literary history can be written.