Lunchtime Talk: Women Poets

Only a few women have made it into Poets’ Corner at Westminster Abbey yet history is filled with remarkable female writers. Professor Helen Hackett will consider what cultural forces led some women to be memorialised but not others.

To answer this question, Professor Hackett will discuss the lives of a selection of women poets, beginning with the notable poets Emily Brontë and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, whose eventful lives and inspiring works are commemorated in the Abbey.

She will then shine a light on some of the female poets commemorated elsewhere in the Abbey, such as Elizabeth Russell and Margaret Cavendish, before looking beyond its walls to encounter some distinguished women poets who are entirely missing from the Abbey, including Aemilia Lanyer and Mary Wroth.

This event is part of our monthly ‘Lunchtime Talk’ series. On the second Wednesday of every month, join us at St Margaret’s Church for an in-depth exploration of part of the Abbey’s history.

About Helen Hackett

Helen Hackett is a Professor of English at University College London, specialising in literature of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and with particular interests in writing by and about women. Her most recent book, The Elizabethan Mind (2022), explores the turbulent debates of Shakespeare’s time about the mind in relation to body, soul, and self, and includes a chapter on ideas about the female mind.

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