In Little Songs Women Silence and the NineteenthCentury Sonnet Amy Christine Billone analyzes the bond between lyric poetry and silence in womens sonnets ranging from the late eighteenthcentury works of Charlotte Smith Helen Maria Williams and Anna Maria Smallpiece to Victorian texts by Elizabeth Barrett Christina Rossetti Isabella Southern and other lesserknown female poets. Although scholars acknowledge that women initiated the sonnet revival in England Little Songs is the only major study of nineteenthcentury female sonneteers. ampampnbsp Billone argues not that womens sonnets overcame silence in favor of lyrical speech during the nineteenthcentury sonnet revival but rather that women simultaneously posited both muteness and volubility through style and theme. In opposition to criticism that stresses a modern shift from compensatory to nonconsolatory poems of mourning Billone demonstrates how women invented contemporary elegiac poetics a century in advance. ampampnbsp Adding to critical interest in the alliance between silence and literature this book offers a complex study of the overwhelming impact that silence makes not only on British womens poetry but also on the development of modern poetry and intellectual inquiry. Ultimately Little Songs illustrates how the turn away from the kind of silence that preoccupied nineteenthcentury women poets introduced the start of twentiethcentury thought.