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India and women's poetry of the 1830s: femininity and the picturesque in the poetry of emma roberts and letitia Elizabeth Landon

2005; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 12; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/09699080500200345

1747-5848

Máire ní Fhlathúin,

Global Maritime and Colonial Histories

Abstract This analysis of women's writing on colonial India studies the work of Emma Roberts and Letitia Elizabeth Landon against the accounts of the picturesque and its function in colonial writing on India established by Sara Suleri and Nigel Leask. Roberts and Landon both work within this tradition, but ultimately find it inadequate to contain their explorations of domestic as well as colonial femininity. At this point, they supplement the poetic with other forms: prose versions, epigraphs, or endnotes, which have the effect of drawing attention to and disrupting the “screen effect” of the picturesque. In so doing, they explore those “more shattering aspects of [India's ] difference” (Suleri) which it was normally the woman writer's function to alleviate