The poetry and place of Anna Wickham, 1910-1930

My dissertation examines two decades in the life of British poet Anna Wickham (Edith Hepburn, nee Harper), recently regaining critical attention through the 1985 Norton Anthology of Literature by Women, and the 1990 The Gender of Modernism: A Critical Anthology. Wickham (1883-1947) is doubly fascinating because her life and her poetry are so much a part of literary modernism, and arise out of the opposition of her lingering desire for Victorian stability in verse and in life, and the widening prospects of her post-World War I environment.; This first book-length study of Wickham uses historical, biographical, bibliographical, reader-response and gynocritical approaches to detail Wickham's part in literary modernism and her use of both free verse and more traditional verse forms as modes of expression. Wickham has been held up as the prototypical "rebellious wife" in poetry, but this definition should be expanded not only in order to define her as a determined artist in her own right but also to allow for the multiple contradictions that made up Wickham's life and verse. Wickham's work, (pithy, ironic, argumentative, humorous, scathing, gentle) is especially contemporary in her wrestling with gender issues and in her concern with social questions.; Wickham's publishing history is offered here in both narrative and much needed bibliographic form as typical of modernism, connecting with small presses (The Poetry Bookshop) and little magazines (Poetry, Egoist) which were extremely conscious of ground-breaking content, style and presentation. Noteworthy also are her associations with Natalie Barney in Paris and with artistic and literary figures such as D. H. Lawrence, Harold Monro, Louis Untermeyer, Edna Millay and Nina Hamnett, participating in the international modernist mix of ideas and people. Using printed sources, unpublished manuscripts, the Hepburn family papers and library collections from three countries (England, U.S.A. and France) where her work was published, the dissertation provides a solid reference for the study of Wickham's poetry and her life. The purpose of this dissertation is to bring to Anna Wickham the more broadly-based recognition her writing deserves.