The Princess (poem)

The Princess is a serio-comic blank verse narrative poem, written by Alfred Tennyson, published in 1847. Tennyson was Poet Laureate of the United Kingdom from 1850 to 1892 and remains one of the most popular English poets.

The poem tells the story of an heroic princess who forswears the world of men and founds a women's university where men are forbidden to enter. The prince to whom she was betrothed in infancy enters the university with two friends, disguised as women students. They are discovered and flee, but eventually they fight a battle for the princess's hand. They lose and are wounded, but the women nurse the men back to health. Eventually the princess returns the prince's love.

Several later works have been based upon the poem, including Gilbert and Sullivan's comic opera Princess Ida.

Tennyson planned the poem in the late 1830s after discussing the idea with Emily Sellwood, whom he later married in 1850. It seems to have been a response to criticism that he was not writing about serious issues. It was also a response, in part, to the founding of Queen's College, London, Britain's first college for women, in 1847. Two of Tennyson's friends were part-time professors there. Other critics speculate that the poem was partly inspired by the opening of Love's Labour's Lost and other literary works.Janet Ross, the daughter of Lucie, Lady Duff-Gordon recalled that "[Tennyson] told my mother that he had her in mind when he wrote The Princess. I don't think she was as much flattered as many of his admirers would have been".

Tennyson is reported as saying, in the 1840s, that "the two great social questions impending in England were 'the education of the poor man before making him our master, and the higher education of women'." The women's rights movement, including the right to higher education, was still at an early stage in 1847. In Britain, the first university-level women's school, Girton College, Cambridge was not opened until 1869, more than two decades after Tennyson wrote The Princess. In A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), however, Mary Wollstonecraft had been an early advocate of the equality of men and women, and writers such as John Stuart Mill had argued for female emancipation. Nevertheless, "Tennyson was in the vanguard in writing of the subject and although feminist critics have complained about the conservative ending of his poem, he must be credited with broaching the topic and voicing some of the injustices women suffered." In The Princess, "Tennyson describes with such clarity the principal problems of feminism".

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