Elegiac Muses is the first general introduction to the poetry, culture, and politics of the romantic poetess in Europe. Between 1820 and 1840, a sisterhood of artists throughout Europe, including Felicia Hemans and Letitia Landon in England, Marceline Desbordes-Valmore, Delphine Gay, and Amable Tastu in France, and Evdokia Rostopchina and Karolina Pavlova in Russia, produced gendered, sentimental poetry, which shared a common political aspiration. Following in the footsteps of Germaine de Stael (and her heroine Corinne, 1807), these women wrote to foster sympathy and facilitate the development of a liberal, internationalist culture, identifying with writers from other countries, imagining their "civilizing mission" as collective and universal.

From a new, comparative perspective, Patrick Vincent nimbly restores the unjustly debased image of the romantic poetess in this outstanding investigation of complex nineteenth-century intersections between femininity and writing, public and political aspirations, and literary commodification. Among the book's noteworthy achievements is its establishment of the romantic poetess as an important figure in the emergence of the modern liberal state.