Sonnets on Anglo-Saxon History

One hundred prose narratives precede one hundred sonnets in this ambitious Victorian work that traces Britain's story from its earliest days through the Norman Conquest. Ann Hawkshaw, among the first women to publish poetry under her own name, drew on Bede, the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, and contemporary historians to craft commentaries that set the historical stage. Her sonnets then soar beyond mere retellings, they reimagine kings and saints, warriors and chroniclers, casting familiar figures in startling new light. This is not popular history rendered in verse but something stranger: a poet's conversation with the past, one sonnet at a time. Born in Yorkshire and later drawn into Manchester's luminous literary circle through her husband John Hawkshaw and her friendship with Elizabeth Gaskell, Hawkshaw brought both rigor and imagination to her historical poetics. For readers who wonder what poetry can do that prose cannot, here is the answer, rendered in strict forms across a thousand years of English history.