The term 'slip-shod sibyls' is adapted from a gibe of Alexander Pope. It encapsulates the common contempt for the half-educated women who dared to expose themselves in the literary market-place, convinced that they were born poets. In this collection Germaine Greer argues that the problem is not that women who wrote poetry in English before 1900 were ignored but that, when most women were unable to express themselves in written form at all, and only a tiny minority of them dared to write in metre, the female poet was given undue attention, flattered and exploited only to be rejected and humiliated in her own lifetime and forgotten by posterity. She argues that as much as we yearn to have women's poetry seriously studied in schools and universities, what has come down to us is not worthy of inclusion in the canon, for all kinds of reasons. In many cases the texts are inauthentic and cannot be relied upon to represent women's work or women's sensibility. In virtually all cases the poetry is intensely derivative and cannot be evaluated by readers who are unfamiliar with the poets' models.