This study began by addressing the problematic aspects of the muse for women poets, particularly during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In my Introduction, I outlined the way in which women in the Western literary tradition have been consistently depicted as passive inspirers and ‘Tenth Muses’, making it difficult for them to claim poetic identity – which was associated exclusively with the active, creative powers attributed to masculinity. One potential solution to this dilemma was for women to claim a muse of their own, in order to move themselves into the subject-position of poet. However, this proposed ‘solution’ presented its own problems for women poets, as they risked turning another woman into a passive object, or confronting an intimidating God-like male muse (an issue addressed by Margaret Homans and Joanne Feit Diehl). Due to these dangers, the concept of the muse has remained a problematic one, discussed and debated by feminist critics throughout the latter half of the twentieth century. These feminist critics tended to advocate either eradicating the idea of the muse altogether, or reimagining the muse/poet relationship along more empowering, female-oriented lines. For example, Adrienne Rich and Mary Carruthers urge women to identify with the muse: ‘By familiarising the muse, Lesbian myth provides a way of seeing the poet in the woman, not as alien or monstrous, but as an aspect of her womanhood’. In this sense, they attempt to reconstruct the woman poet's, muse as ‘not Other but Familiar’.