Abstract:
This book explores Augusta Webster’s eight dramatic monologues spoken by women speakers, selected from her Dramatic Studies and Portraits. This curious array of women characters covers gender roles from classical to modern, from historical to Victorian, from conventional to unconventional. Such voices were not usually granted poetic authority in works by male Victorian poets, therefore studying these characters created by Webster not only enriches the repertoire of poetic representations of women but also questions and challenges some established generic definitions of the dramatic monologue and much more.