[In the following excerpt, Trott examines the methodology and themes of Women in Romanticism, noting the defects and strengths of Alexander's views.]

Meena Alexander takes Wollstonecraft to be a woman in Romanticism, rather than a precursor. Her book [Women in Romanticism] is most keenly aware, though, of the ways in which the term needs to be redefined if women writers are to have a place of their own within the Romantic estate. The three women in question—Wollstonecraft, Wordsworth, and Shelley, two tragically blood-related, one the sibling of the chief Romantic poet—work surprisingly well together. Alexander exploits their sharp dissimilarities, and sees them partly in terms of historical change, but there are unusual links made, too, as for example between Dorothy Wordsworth, Mary Shelley, and the Lucy poems.

Although she erects a conceptual framework around the ideas of self and subjectivity, the body and maternity, knowledge and power, Alexander's method is essentially biographical. The undogmatic stance is most effective where Dorothy is concerned, and the book might readily have been a monograph. Theoretical feminists will no doubt find the approach tame, even timid; of Dorothy's position in Tintern Abbey, for instance, Alexander writes:

While it is difficult to doubt the acute, pained love the poet bears for his sister, it is equally difficult from a feminist perspective not to acknowledge the sister's symbolic presence as subservient to both genius and desire, gaining power precisely insofar as she is gathered into his vision.

In general, the tone of the book is uneven; this measured justness elsewhere lapses into the gauche, and the introductory quality of the 'Women Writers' imprint militates against Alexander's thematic sophistication. Her theme is the problematic relation of women writers to the central and centralizing assumptions of Romanticism, as it is masculinely defined. Women are seen as tangential to and displaced by the male formulations of the period, including the myths of their own nature, and indeed of Nature per se. At the same time, Alexander's project is to relocate these myths in such way that it becomes possible to think in specific terms of a 'Romantic Feminine'. The placing of women in Romanticism also generates a series of qualifying insights into its male practitioners:

It seems to me that it can only render our reading of Wordsworth more complex, more true, to point out that the centrality of the ego he forged through his astonishing rituals of perception was perfectly in tune with the societal permissions granted the male.

There does remain the distinct problem, never really taken up by Alexander, of identifying essentialist 'male' and 'female' Romanticisms. On a practical level, however, the book rarely deals in crass oppositions. Alexander displays an awareness of difference among the male Romantics, as well as a desire to see the female in terms of their masculine others and brothers, as the case may be. A wide range of works are examined within a slim volume and with varying success, but the effect is not usually superficial. It is of Dorothy that Alexander has most scholarly expertise, and disappointing, therefore, that the texts themselves, even where relatively unknown or available only in manuscript, are under-quoted. But though at times I found myself impatient with the 'bite-size' sections, with the lack of quotation and alarming distaste for commas, the book offers an enlarged and enhanced view of Romanticism with many suggestions to pursue.