Lives of the Female Poets and Emily Brontë's sex life

Lives of the Female Poets is a recent collection of poetry by Clare Pollard, which contains several prose poems about Emily Brontë: 

Lives of the Female Poets

by Clare Pollard

Bloodaxe Books

ISBN: 9781780377476

September 2025

Clare Pollard cocks a snook at Dr Johnson’s all-male Lives of the Poets in chronicling her own life and theirs in her Lives of the Female Poets. These portraits and self portraits offer glimpses into the poet’s own everyday life – from nit-combing and laundry to pollen counts and cocktails, watching school plays to shopping on Rye Lane – all whilst in conversation with female poets through the ages.

Playing with forms from the version to the glosa, these are poems that remix, adapt and channel figures from Enheduanna, the first recorded poet, through to Wanda Coleman. Probing the idea of the ‘Poetess’ over time, there are also poems about writers’ lives – sonnets for Anne Locke, who wrote the first English sonnet sequence; a sestina for Elizabeth Bishop; a series of prose poems about Emily Brontë; and a look at the tragic life of L.E.L.

Whether imagining a ‘three-martini afternoon’ at the Ritz with Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton, or exploring the ways women writers have been erased from the canon in the book’s long, closing poem, Clare Pollard’s playful sixth collection celebrates and commemorates all those female poets who have come before.

There are three poems about Emily Brontë, as far as we know: On Emily Brontë, Age Six;  The Sex of Emily Brontë, and Emily Brontë and the Critic. On the Rough Trade Books podcast (via Soho Radio), the author discusses that her collection includes biographical poems about female poets. She mentions there's "a poem about Emily Brontë masturbating," which she acknowledges "might be a flashpoint for some people what they think is too much."
She explains that throughout the poem she's constantly questioning "am I allowed to say this? Is this too much?" She adds that "the only person I've experienced of masturbating myself really so, you know, it's obviously a self a self-portrait on some level."
Claire then contextualizes it by saying she was "a very sexually frustrated teenager who like didn't have a proper [relationship] until I was about 20." She believes Emily Brontë had a similar experience, noting she'd watched a film that implied Brontë had a torrid affair and thought "oh really" - clearly skeptical, believing Brontë was more likely sexually frustrated like Claire herself had been.