“When Poor Mama Long Restless Lies, / She Drinks the Poppy’s Juice”: Opium and Gender in British Romantic Literature

Abstract

This chapter explores depictions of opium in the women’s writing of the British Romantic period, comparing and contrasting them with the better-known opium literature written by their male contemporaries, Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Thomas De Quincey. By discussing these works in the context of Romantic-era medical writings on opium, which persistently condemned the use of opiates as recreational stimulants while maintaining that they had legitimate medical uses as sedatives, the essay argues that female writers of the period took care to align their accounts of their own usage of opiates with the medically approved sedative properties of the drug, thus distancing themselves from the orientalised and countercultural figure of the hedonistic “opium-eater”, with which no “respectable” female author of the period could afford to be identified.