Women’s Voices is an anthology of the most characteristic poems by English, Scotch and Irish women, selected and arranged by Mrs. William Sharp.  ‘The idea of making this anthology,’ says Mrs. Sharp, in her preface, ’arose primarily from the conviction that our women-poets had never been collectively represented with anything like adequate justice; that the works of many are not so widely known as they deserve to be; and that at least some fine fugitive poetry could be thus rescued from oblivion’; and Mrs. Sharp proceeds to claim that the ’selections will further emphasise the value of women’s work in poetry for those who are already well acquainted with English Literature, and that they will convince many it is as possible to form an anthology of “pure poetry” from the writings of women as from those of men.’  It is somewhat difficult to define what ‘pure poetry’ really is, but the collection is certainly extremely interesting, extending, as it does, over nearly three centuries of our literature.  It opens with Revenge, a poem by the ‘learned, virtuous, and truly noble Ladie,’ Elizabeth Carew, who published a Tragedie of Marian, the faire Queene of Iewry, in 1613, from which Revenge is taken.  Then come some very pretty verses by Margaret, Duchess of Newcastle, who produced a volume of poems in 1653.  They are supposed to be sung by a sea-goddess, and their fantastic charm and the graceful wilfulness of their fancy are well worthy of note, as these first stanzas show: 

   My cabinets are oyster-shells,
   In which I keep my Orient pearls;
   And modest coral I do wear,
   Which blushes when it touches air.

   On silvery waves I sit and sing,
   And then the fish lie listening: 
   Then resting on a rocky stone
   I comb my hair with fishes’ bone;

   The whilst Apollo with his beams
   Doth dry my hair from soaking streams,
   His light doth glaze the water’s face,
   And make the sea my looking-glass.

Then follow Friendship’s Mystery, by ‘The Matchless Orinda,’ Mrs. Katherine Philips; A Song, by Mrs. Aphra Behn, ’the first English woman who adopted literature as a profession’; and the Countess of Winchelsea’s Nocturnal Reverie.  Wordsworth once said that, with the exception of this poem and Pope’s Windsor Forest, ’the poetry of the period intervening between Paradise Lost and The Seasons does not contain a single new image of external nature,’ and though the statement is hardly accurate, as it leaves Gay entirely out of account, it must be admitted that the simple naturalism of Lady Winchelsea’s description is extremely remarkable.  Passing on through Mrs. Sharp’s collection, we come across poems by Lady Grisell Baillie; by Jean Adams, a poor ‘sewing-maid in a Scotch manse,’ who died in the Greenock Workhouse; by Isobel Pagan, ’an Ayrshire lucky, who kept an alehouse, and sold whiskey without a license,’ ’and sang her own songs as a means of subsistence’;