Louisa Stuart Costello and Poetry

Abstract

Costello’s first publication and her last book were both volumes of poetry in an enduring writing career. When the death of her father forced Costello to earn her living, she turned to poetry to supplement the income she was making from copying illuminated manuscripts and painting miniatures. Poetry was the only sensible genre in which a young woman who wanted to make money could publish: the association of poetry with sentiment, with “the thoughts and words in which emotion spontaneously embodies itself,”² meant that it was an “essential pursuit for women as readers as well as poets.”³ The publication of The Maid of the Cyprus Isle, and Other Poems (Maid; 1815) followed the characteristic template of such a work by a young female poet at the time, and closely imitated the publication pattern of Felicia Hemans’s (then Browne) first volume Poems (1808). It was published by subscription, with the support of clergymen, gentry, academics, and military men, and their female relations: headed by the Duchess of Leeds, to whom the volume is dedicated, the subscription list also includes the Countess of Lanesborough, and the Marquis of Anglesey.

During this period, also, were several poetical contributors, one of whom, Joanna Baillie, had already taken her place in the literature of her country; and the names of others, amongst them Mrs Hemans, Miss Costello, and Miss Landon (L. E. L.), were destined also to endure.¹