Ann Yearsley was an English poet, playwright, and novelist who lived most of her life in a village near Bristol. Though she began her adult life as a milkwoman she later became the chief support of her family through her writing and proprietorship of a circulating library. This literary biography offers the most thoroughly researched and reasoned account to date of the complex political and social causes of Yearsley's gradual exclusion from the annals of literature. Yearsley published her first volume of poetry in 1785 with the support of Hannah More and other members of the "Bluestocking" circle, who regarded her as something of a primitive savant. Soon thereafter, however, Yearsley broke with her patrons in a bitter dispute regarding the book's profits. Although condemned for ingratitude by More and her friends, Yearsley continued to publish with the support of more liberal members of the establishment. Nevertheless, the more conservative counsels prevailed as events in France from 1789 demonstrated the dangers of popular political agitation. Although Yearsley consistently rejected such activity, her perceived status tended to label her at least potentially subversive. Consequently, most commentary on her work during her later writing life and the century after her death portrayed her primarily as the ungrateful protégée of the more acceptable More, and mistakenly associated her with such avowed radicals as Mary Wollstonecraft. Although present-day Marxist and feminist theorists deserve much credit for revitalizing interest in Yearsley, says Mary Waldron, the writer has often been just as misrepresented or misunderstood by her modern champions, being celebrated for the very qualities or tendencies erroneously attributed to her by earlier readers and critics. With the publication of this broad literary-historical study, a more complete picture of Yearsley, as an individual and on her own terms, emerges.

In Britain, the period that stretches from the middle of the eighteenth century to the mid-nineteenth century marks the emergence of the working classes, alongside and in response to the development of the middle-class public sphere. This collection contributes to that scholarship by exploring the figure of the "working-class intellectual," who both assimilates the anti-authoritarian lexicon of the middle classes to create a new political and cultural identity, and revolutionizes it with the subversive energy of class hostility. Through considering a broad range of writings across key moments of working-class self-expression, the essays reevaluate a host of familiar writers such as Robert Burns, John Thelwall, Charles Dickens, Charles Kingsley, Ann Yearsley, and even Shakespeare, in terms of their role within a working-class constituency. The collection also breaks fresh ground in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century scholarship by shedding light on a number of unfamiliar and underrepresented figures, such as Alexander Somerville, Michael Faraday, and the singer Ned Corvan.

Lactilla Tends her Fav'rite Cow benefits from the foundations set by earlier studies of laboring-class writers even as it extends their conclusions through the use of an explicitly ecocritical perspective."--BOOK JACKET.

First published in 2000, this collection of essays focuses on women theatre artists in the romantic period.

Essays on the post-modern reception and interpretation of the Middle Ages. Though Studies in Medievalism has hosted many essays on gender, this is the first volume devoted specifically to that theme. The first part features four short essays that directly address manifestations of sexism in postmedieval responses to the Middle Ages: gender substitutions in a Grail Quest episode of the 2023 television series Mrs. Davis, repurposed misogyny in the last two episodes of Game of Thrones (2011-19), traditional gender stereotypes in Capital One's credit card commercials from 2000 to 2013, and "shaggy" medievalism in Robert Eggers' 2022 film The Northman. The second part contains ten longer essays, which collectively continue to demonstrate the ubiquity of gender issues and the extraordinary flexibility of approaches to them. The authors discuss the misogynistic sexualization of Grendel's mother in Parke Godwin's 1995 fantasy novel The Tower of Beowulf, in Graham Baker's 1999 film Beowulf, in three episodes from the television series Xena: Warrior Princess, and in Robert Zemeckis's 2007 film Beowulf; gender substitution in David Lowery's 2021 film The Green Knight and in Kinoku Nasu's and Takashi Takeuchi's anime series Fate (2004-); female authorship of three early-nineteenth-century plays about court ladies' medieval empowerment; extraordinary violence in medievalist video games; nationalism in fake nineteenth-century medievalist documents and in contemporary online fora; racial discrimination in video gaming and in Jim Crow literature; and the condemnation of racism in Maria Dahvana Headley's 2018 novel The Mere Wife.

'The Lab'ring Muses' is the first study to bring together a wide range of verse published by laboring-class authors between 1730 and 1830. The book examines a total of sixteen case studies that establish a specifically English tradition of laboring-class poetics.

Dr Johnson's friendships with the leading women writers of the day was an important feature of his life and theirs. He was willing to treat women as intellectual equals and to promote their careers: something ignored by his main biographer, James Boswell. Dr Johnson's Women investigates the lives and writings of six leading female authors Johnson knew well: Elizabeth Carter, Charlotte Lennox, Elizabeth Montagu, Hester Thrale, Hannah More and Fanny Burney. It explores their relationships with Johnson, with each other and with the world of letters. It shows what it was like to be a woman writer in the 'Age of Johnson'. It is often assumed that women writers in the eighteenth century suffered the same restrictions and obstacles that confronted their Victorian successors. Norma Clarke shows that this was by no means the case. Highlighting the opportunities available to women of talent in the eighteenth century, Dr Johnson's Women makes clear just how impressive and varied their achievements were.