Love's Witness: Five Centuries of Love Poetry by Women

Book jacket/back: The work of women poets is often overlooked in anthologies, and collections of love poetry are no exception. This delightful and highly original collection redresses that imbalance, and shows that on the subject of romantic and sexual love women can be just as eloquent as men -- or moreso. Here, the bitter and the sweet mingle as women from the last five hundred years write about jealousy, fikleness, exhiliaration, the pain of parting, and the transience of love. Included are poems from a huge range of women's love poetry which has remained largely invisible since the fifteenth century, as well as poems by well-known names such as Stevie Smith, Emily Dickenson, Christina Rossetti, Emily Bronte, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Edith Wharton, Katherine Mansfield Amy Lowell, George Eliot and even Queen Elizabeth I.