This collection of twelve critical essays on women's poetry of the eighteenth century and enlightenment is the first to range widely over individual poets and to undertake a comprehensive exploration of their work. Experiment with genre and form, the poetics of the body, the politics of gender, revolutionary critique, and patronage, are themes of the collection, which includes discussions of the distinctive projects of Mary Leapor, Ann Yearsley, Helen Maria Williams, Joanna Baillie, Charlotte Smith, Anna Barbauld and Lucy Aikin.

This collection of twelve critical essays on women's poetry of the eighteenth century and enlightenment is the first to range widely over individual poets and to undertake a comprehensive exploration of their work. Experiment with genre and form, the poetics of the body, the politics of gender, revolutionary critique, and patronage, are themes of the collection, which includes discussions of the distinctive projects of Mary Leapor, Ann Yearsley, Helen Maria Williams, Joanna Baillie, Charlotte Smith, Anna Barbauld and Lucy Aikin.

An international team of specialists examine the dynamic relation between women and the public sphere.

An Ancient Collection Reimagined Composed around the Buddha’s lifetime, the Therigatha (“Verses of the Elder Nuns”) contains the poems of the first Buddhist women: princesses and courtesans, tired wives of arranged marriages and the desperately in love, those born into limitless wealth and those born with nothing at all. The original authors of the Therigatha were women from every kind of background, but they all shared a deep-seated desire for awakening and liberation. In The First Free Women, Matty Weingast has reimagined this ancient collection and created a contemporary and radical adaptation that takes the essence of each poem and highlights the struggles and doubts, as well as the strength, perseverance, and profound compassion, embodied by these courageous women.

This study reconstructs the political origins of English women's poetry between the execution of Charles I and the death of Queen Anne. Based on extensive archival research in England and the United States, Barash argues that ideas about women's voices and women's communities were crucial to the shaping of an English national literature after the civil wars. Women entered print culture--as poets and as women--by situating their writing in defence of embattled monarchy. In particular, Barash points to women poets' fascination with the figure of the female monarch (both real and mythic). Their sense of poetic legitimacy derives from the communities they generate around figures of female authority, particularly James II's second wife, Mary of Modena, and later Queen Anne. Writers discussed include Aphra Behn, Katherine Philips, Anne Killigrew, Jane Barker, and Anne Finch.

Winner, 2011 Annibel Jenkins Biography Prize, American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies 2009 Outstanding Academic Title, Choice Against the background of the American and French revolutions, the Napoleonic Wars, and the struggle for religious equality in Great Britain, a brilliant, embattled woman strove to defend Enlightenment values to her nation. Poet, teacher, essayist, political writer, editor, and critic, Anna Letitia Barbauld was venerated by contemporaries on both sides of the Atlantic, among them the young Walter Scott, the young Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and Boston Unitarians such as William Ellery Channing. After decades in the historical limbo into which almost all work by women writers of her era was swept, Barbauld's writings on citizenly ethics, identity politics, church-state relations, and empire are still deeply relevant today. Inquiring and witty as well as principled and passionate, Barbauld was a voice for the Enlightenment in an age of revolution and reaction. Based on more than fifteen years of research in dozens of libraries and archives across five countries, this is the first full-length biography of one of the foremost women writers in Georgian England. "A superb biography that brings a radical literary figure back into the picture . . . a thrilling, brilliant book."—Guardian "McCarthy establishes Barbauld as a figure of major significance. His magnificent biography will draw many others to her, and give her a new and deserved prominence in Enlightenment and Romantic studies."—Women's Writing "A tour de force . . . Honest, wise, original."—Eighteenth-Century Studies William McCarthy is professor emeritus of English at Iowa State University. He is the coeditor of The Poems of Anna Letitia Barbauld and the author of Hester Thrale Piozzi: Portrait of a Literary Woman.

The first collection to make a comprehensive study of nineteenth-century women's poetry from late Romantic to late Victorian 'new woman' writers. Eighteen essays consider the gendered codes and genres developed by sophisticated poets. The feminine subject and marketing, a woman's tradition, lesbian desire, war, race, colonial experience, religion and science are themes of the collection, featuring, as well as the familiar Christina Rossetti and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, other poets such as 'L.E.L.', Felicia Hemans, Amy Levy and Augusta Webster.