Eighteenth Century Women Poets: An Oxford Anthology

If you are looking for an affordable overview of female 18th-century poets this is, as of my writing this review, your best bet. Roger Lonsdale has been very thorough in collecting and in many cases often recovering works that have been lost to publishing for decades. I used this anthology for a particular purpose (researching 18th-century women poets of the laboring class) and was gratified to discover not only more poems by Mary Leapor and Ann Yearsley than I have found elsewhere, but also a number of amazing poets whose work I have never before encountered: Elizabeth Hands and Janet Little among them. If you read this book for no reason other than curiosity, you too will find satisfaction: the poems in this anthology were not chosen merely for the sake of inclusivity; they are brilliant, funny, honest, tragic, witty, philosophical, gentle, and sharp. You will find scissor-like pairs of couplets and blank verse as high and stately as Milton's. There is a great deal of poetic originality, and a great deal of the neoclassicism that was almost the currency of the period's poetry--often, however, used in an unexpected way one would never think to find in one of the canonized male poets of the century. These poems are so far from being the dregs of 18th-century literature that my only serious complaint about the anthology is that it is too short. A number of important poems, for instance Mary Collier's "The Woman's Labour" and Mary Leapor's "Crumble-Hall," have been abridged, very regrettably as they are well worth reading in full. The mainly biographical introductions to each poet are satisfactorily lengthy (when one considers how little information is readily availble about many of the more obscure writers) and, I feel, make up for the lack of annotation to the poems themselves, an addition which would have made the book much longer and surely far pricier. I'll leave you with two quotations from poems in the anthology. First, from Elizabeth Hands (a servant and later a blacksmith's wife), part of her 1789 "Poem, on the Supposition of an Advertisement appearing in a Morning Paper, of the Publication of a Volume of Poems, by a Servant-Maid": The tea-kettle bubbled, the tea things were set, The candles were lighted, the ladies were met; The how d'ye's were over, and entering bustle, The company seated, and silks ceased to rustle: The great Mrs. Consequence opened her fan, And thus the discourse in an instant began (All affected reserve and formality scorning): 'I suppose you all saw in the paper this morning A volume of Poems advertised---'tis said They're produced by the pen of a poor servant-maid.' 'A servant write verses!' says Madam Du Bloom: 'Pray what is the subject---a Mop, or a Broom?' 'He, he, he,' says Miss Flounce: 'I suppose we shall see An Ode on a Dishclout---what else can it be?'... And secondly, from Sarah Egerton, the unhappily married daughter of a landowner, part of her 1703 poem "To One who said I must not Love": Bid the fo