"Scientific Wooing": Constance Naden's Marriage of Science and Poetry

Abstract

WITH THE REEXAMINATION OF POETRY AND VERSE BY LATE-VICTORIAN WOMEN writers, new aspects of the dialogue between Victorian poetry and the sciences are emerging. Constance Naden and other contemporary poets frequently grappled in a lively fashion with topical, sometimes transient, cultural debates, and their work often engaged with scientific themes. Naden's "Scientific Wooing" is emblematic of this phenomenon with its witty amalgamation of the discourses of the love lyric and the sciences in the form of a narrator who is determined to seduce his lover through the tropes of science. 1 I look specifically at Constance Naden in this essay because she was, unusually among her female contemporaries, publishing papers in scientific journals as well as producing books of poetry. In her work, then, there is the possibility of observing true dialogue and reciprocity between the disciplines. Naden was also geographically located at the center of one well-known Victorian exchange about literature and science, and her body of poetic and scientific work can be used as a case study around which to focus that debate.