As a female student of English literature, I am often confronted with the reality that women authors, particularly of earlier literary periods, are not as present in the canon as their male counterparts. This is an issue that comes up over and over, and goes without saying. However, I do think that it is worth examining why and how the literary canon has come to be structured with such a prominently gendered slant.

The straightforward response, given by almost everyone when asked about this lack of equal representation, is that not a lot of women were educated in “those days” and that therefore not enough of them were writing things of note to bring them significant representation. In large part, this is true, and even women who did strike out bravely to become novelists or poets then would, of course, run into issues with publishers unwilling to read their manuscripts or attach their reputations to the sure-to-fail endeavors of female writers.

This is not the part that surprises me. This part is something that is so widely known and dealt with that I am used to it. Only recently though, was I confronted with another reason for lack of representation which I find more troubling--the way women authors are treated in academia. During my time this past semester studying at University College London, I took a class on the Romantic Period. One of the last lectures in this class was titled “Women in Romantic Literature.” While prominent male authors like John Keats, Wordsworth and Scott justifiably got their own lectures, even lesser known authors like Thomas Peacock were featured individually. (Thomas Peacock, incidentally, is a pretty fascinating guy.) But despite many female authors being more influential than some of their male counterparts, the women were still lumped together for the final lecture, many extensive careers pared down to a few sentences each.

Mary Robinson began her career with the necessity of supporting her family. Her husband, Thomas Robinson, whom she reluctantly married for financial reasons, had lied about having a large inheritance and landed himself in debtors’ prison, where she stayed with him before finding a sponsor for her poetry and taking to the stage. She was an actress, poet, and even the poetry editor of the Morning Post at the end of her life, responsible for publishing the works of writers like William Wordsworth, in addition to featuring her own.

Throughout her career, she was in contact with many prominent writers, central in the social and literary circles of the Romantic period. In particular, she maintained a fruitful correspondence with Samuel Taylor Coleridge (of "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" fame), who held her in high esteem and was heavily influenced by Robinson’s style. Anyone who is interested in looking at this further (or anyone who doesn’t believe her work influenced his) should take a look at Mary Robinson’s "Anselmo," "Hermit of the Alps," published in 1794, and compare it with Coleridge’s famous poem, "The Mad Monk," published in 1800. Down to the love interest being named Rosa, the poems are unmistakably similar in content and style. It is interesting, then, that most studies of the period focus on Coleridge and neglect Robinson.

Robert Southey, an influential poet, letter-writer and biographer of the time, a figure of great influence in the publishing world, responded to a young Charlotte Bronte’s inquiry about her writing, saying that though her writing showed skill, “Literature cannot be the business of a woman’s life.” Quotes like this make it easy to accept lack of women in the canon as the ancient sexism that prevented generations of women from pursuing literary careers. But often, the gender gap created by factors like lack of education for women, or publishers being unwilling to support women authors, is still more exaggerated by the disproportionate amount of study and literary criticism dedicated to male authors.

Mary Robinson is a glaring example of a woman who was a literary celebrity in her own time, but who is largely absent from discussions of Romantic literature. Her exclusion, in large part, from the literary canon shows something much more troubling: modern sexism, on the part of academia, that we have become comfortable accepting.