The writings and satire of Pope and Swift have aroused intense hostilities in women readers and feminists, both in their own day and ours, for their allegedly unsympathetic treatment of women. They have been accused of indifference to the plight of eighteenth-century women in a patriarchal society and even of exhibiting sexist and misogynistic attitudes in the case of the eighteenth-century woman writer.

Anne Finch and Her Poetry is the first major critical examination of the life and works of the foremost English woman poet of the eighteenth century. This biography places Anne Finch (1661-1720) in her social and literary milieu and includes discussion of such topics as love and marriage, female friendships, melancholy, and nature as they relate both to Finch's life and to her poetry. Barbara McGovern gives considerable attention to the methods by which Finch developed her artistry and molded a largely masculine literary tradition to her own designs through a variety of rhetorical and stylistic devices. She examines the entire body of Finch's work, including two verse plays and a number of previously unpublished poems and letters, and corrects numerous misconceptions about the poet and her work. Though recognized in her lifetime as a talented poet, for nearly two hundred years Finch has been overlooked or, when anthologized, misrepresented. McGovern focuses on the historical place and displacement of Finch in Restoration and early eighteenth-century England in terms of her involvement with Britain's most critical religious and political controversies. An Anglican and Royalist who along with her husband was attached to the Stuart court at the time of the Glorious Revolution, Finch was an outsider because of her politics and religion as well as her gender. Despite her marginal status in society, Anne Finch was able to develop her poetic identity in part by defining her relationships with other early women writers, including Katherine Philips and Aphra Behn. Her female friendships, as well as aristocratic family ties and titled position, gave her access to a number of the most famous literary figures of her age, including Alexander Pope and Jonathan Swift. A thoroughly researched, well-written, and compelling work, Anne Finch and Her Poetry will no doubt become the standard biography of the finest woman poet in England before the nineteenth century.

Alexander Pope (1688-1744) was the most important English poet of the 18th century, as well as an essayist, satirist, and critic. Many of his sayings are still quoted today. His Essay on Criticism shaped the aesthetic views of English Neoclassicism, while his Essay on Man reflected the moral views of the Enlightenment. He participated fully in the critical debates of his time and was one of the few poets who supported himself through his writing. This reference conveniently summarizes his life and works. Included are several-hundred alphabetically arranged entries on Pope's works, subjects that interested him, historical events that impacted Pope's life and work, cultural terms and categories, Pope's family members and acquaintances, major scholars and critics, and various other topics related to his writings. The entries reflect current scholarship and cite works for further reading. The encyclopedia also provides a chronology and concludes with a selected, general bibliography. Because of Pope's central importance to the Enlightenment, this book is also a useful companion to 18th-century literary and intellectual culture.

Building upon recent research on the history of women, this book examines Swift, both as a man and writer, in terms of women: woman as intimates, acquaintances, subjects of satire, and those who have written about him. It also explores the subject of misogyny in Swift's writings.

If Aphra Benn is widely regarded as the first important woman writer in English, who was the second? In literary history, the eighteenth century belongs to men: Pope and Swift, Richardson and Fielding. Asked to name a woman, even the specialist stumbles. Jane Austen? She didn't publish until 1811. Aphra Benn herself? She died in 1869. The Rise and Fall of the Woman of Letters tells the remarkable but little-known story of women writers in the eighteenth century - of poets, critics, dramatists and scholars celebrated in their own time but all but forgotten by the beginning of the new century. Eliza Haywood, Catherine Cockburn, Elizabeth Elstob, Delarivier Manley, Elizabeth Rowe, Jane Barker, Elizabeth Thomas, Anna Seward... In a book which ranges from country house to Grub Street, Norma Clarke recovers these and other writers, establishes the reasons for their eclipse and discovers that a room of one's own in the eighteenth century was as likely to be a prison cell as a boudoir.

This handbook is a guide to the kinds of satire written in English during the 'long' eighteenth century and it focuses on texts that appeared between the restoration of the Stuart monarchy in 1660 and the outbreak of the French Revolution in 1789.

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.