This large-scale project aims to present a broad, original perspective on the writing and lives of eighteenth century (British) women poets. More specifically, it seeks to do so by giving close attention to the intersections of agency-as evident in the distinct ways in which women made use of poetry in their lives-and genre. Like some other recent scholars, Paula Backscheider here construes the latter term to include categories based on popular contemporary ideas of poems and their purposes, defined sometimes more by form and sometimes more by subject matter. She focuses in particular on the commonalities and differences, both of which she often finds revealing, between the functions of individual genres for men and for women. The roughly forty poets she considers are meant to constitute a diverse but not systematic or exhaustively comprehensive selection.
Acknowledgments
Abbreviations
Plan of the Book
Approaching the Poetry
The Chapters
1. Introduction
Changing Contexts
Systems, Gender, and Persistent Issues
Agency and the ''Marked Marker''
2. Anne Finch and What Women Wrote
The Social and the Formal
Anne Finch and Popular Poetry
Poetry on Poetry
The Spleen as Legacy
3. Women and Poetry in the Public Eye
Poetry as News and Critique
The Woman Question
Elizabeth Singer Rowe
4. Hymns, Narratives, and Innovations in Religious Poetry
The Voice of Paraphrase
The Hymn as Personal Lyric
Religious Poetry as Subversive Narrative
Devout Soliloquies
5. Friendship Poems
The Legacy of Katherine Philips
Encouragement and the Counteruniverse
Jane Brereton
Adaptation and Ideology
6. Retirement Poetry
Beyond Convention
Memory, Time, and Elizabeth Carter
Reflection and Difference
7. The Elegy
What Did Women Write?
Representative Composers: Darwall and Seward
The Elegy and Same-Sex Desire
Entertainment and Forgetting
8. The Sonnet, Charlotte Smith, and What Women Wrote
The Sonnet and the Political
Sonnet Sequences
Women Poets and the Spread of the Sonnet
The Emigrants, Conversations, and Beachy Head
Smith as Transitional Poet
9. Conclusion
Biographies of the Poets
Notes
Bibliography
Index
