In this book I present a critical remapping of colonial Australian poetry to reflect the strong presence of settler women poets, particularly those writing in newspapers and periodicals. In examining this poetry in its original context of newspapers and journals, the political intervention as well as the reception of that poetry is made much more apparent. Five writers published in newspapers and periodicals have been selected as representative of particular periods in Australia (as well as globally), from the 1830s to the turn of the century: Eliza Hamilton Dunlop, Mary Bailey, Caroline Leakey, Emily Manning and Louisa Lawson. The aesthetic and political concerns of these five poets reveal a significant and cohesive imperial feminist movement in Australian settler colonial poetry. However, rather than seeing these poets as working within an insular colonial space, this book demonstrates an alternative networked tradition of imperial and transnational feminist poetics and politics beyond and around emergent masculine nationalism.

All five published in colonial and international contexts, particularly in Britain and North America. All were engaged in various ways in negotiating the domestic ideal in their expression of political voice. Ongoing relationships to political approaches are emphasized in these poets’ engagements with earlier British and wider anglophone women's poetic traditions. In positioning settler women poets in Australia in relation to European and North American movements, this study challenges the dominant cartography of settler colonial Australian literature's relationship to Romanticism and its legacies. The connections of literary Romanticism with revolutionary thought, communitarianism and challenges to women's inequality are particularly significant to much of these women's poetry. I foreground their contributions, particularly in assuming and mobilizing a political voice, to a transnational feminist tradition. This significantly alters the current positioning of settler women poets in relation to Australian literary history. By resituating their work in its broader contexts, my book re-evaluates the political engagement of settler colonial women's poetry.

All five women published poetry extensively in journals and newspapers. The increasing recognition of the importance of periodicals and newspapers in colonial literary studies coincides with developments in print culture studies, and particularly the significance of print culture to political intervention, literary Romanticism and women's traditions.