This essay investigates the ambivalent treatment of suffering, spleen, and sensibility in the work of early Romantic women poets. In many poems a feminized body of sensibility is figured as locus of interiority and as register of pain, pain that is symptomatic of a broader malaise in contemporary culture. If, as Helen Deutsch has observed," in eighteenthcentury Britain nervous disease... was a form of self-expression," 1 then gender was the lens through which the benefits and dangers of such expression were viewed. Authorship in the public sphere had long been a masculinist enterprise, yet the affective subjectivity identified with woman's experience increasingly came to indicate the workings of an individuated self. Melancholy was at the heart of the paradoxical understanding of a capacity for exquisite feeling as being the wellspring of ethical, aesthetic, and even spiritual good, and yet as potentially effeminizing for male and debilitating for female writers. Read for centuries as both sign of affliction and mark of social distinction, melancholy had long had an ambivalent coding in European culture. In the medical treatises and imaginative literature of English writers from the mid-seventeenth century onward, melancholy was often inflected more by gender than by nation, as more female than English malady. 2 By the closing decades of the eighteenth century, hysteria and hypochondria—the gendered variants of melancholy—came to be identified together as two manifestations of the same disorder, with potential for debility being a matter of degree and not of kind. 3 Women's supposed greater sensitivity resulted in a tendency by male writers to lay claim to a capacity to feel intensely; this colonization of the feminine, to use Alan Richardson’s phrase, marks the Romantics' drive to appropriate an aesthetic of nurture and sympathy in order to legitimate a masculine tradition of poetic production. 4 At the same time that they colonize the province of affect, poets like Wordsworth and Shelley reassert the potency of the male author by drawing on a discourse of melancholy in circulation since Aristotle that