"Alas! A Woman May Not Love!"
Augusta Gregory (1852–1932)
“Alas! a woman may not love!” manuscript draft
1886
Gregory wrote this poem in 1886 while returning with her husband from India and Ceylon (now Sri Lanka), where Sir William and his first wife had lived in the 1870s. In the poem, she voices her disillusion with the stereotypical roles then available to women— as sister, wife, and mother. But the hope of finding fulfilling love outside these roles is also unhappily recognized as vain, with the “remorse” and “sore strife” she mentions showing that she was still troubled by her clandestine affair with Blunt. Any love for a man is deemed likely never to be returned in equal measure. In this poem, unpublished until 1987, Gregory reflects directly on the gendered conventions of her time and on the constraints facing her as a woman.
: Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature
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