It has become a critical commonplace to speak of “women's writing” or “women's poetry” as if this is a discrete and recognizable category, with a firm and accepted set of parameters. From here we have evolved an idea of textual “community” that is gender‐based. In this essay, I question the validity of the category, which has no “men's writing” counterpart. I also offer a new understanding of “community,” one which recognizes techniques of poetic variation and pseudonymity. Using three female writers as exemplars, I conclude that a vision of Romantic community derived from particularities of Romantic poetic form is not gender‐based but rather a function of Romanticism itself.