SOURCE: "'The Hidden World Below': Victorian Women Fantasy Poets," in The Poetic Fantastic: Studies in an Evolving Genre, edited by Patrick D. Murphy and Vernon Hyles, Greenwood Press, 1989, pp. 53-64.

In the following essay, Spivak suggests that Victorian women writers turned to fantasy as a way to overcome the limitations society had placed on them, and highlights Christina Rossetti's Goblin Market (1862) as an example of feminist poetry.

The importance of fantastic poetry in the nineteenth century has been widely recognized. Coleridge comes to mind first, with "Kubla Khan" and "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner," but then so do Keats, Shelley, Tennyson, and even Browning. Among the minor host are Hood, Beddoes, Allingham, Dobell, and many others. What has been singularly neglected is the substantial body of fantastic verse written by women during this century. The one example known to most readers is Christina Rossetti's "Goblin Market," a...