Feminist Companion Archive.
Mary Leapor
-
Standard Name: Leapor, Mary
Birth Name: Mary Leapor
Nickname: Molly
Pseudonym: Myra
Pseudonym: A Gardener's Daughter
The poetry of the labouring-class ML
(who died before she was thirty) remakes standard Augustan conventions from an outsider's point of view. This poetry would be important for its sheer literary quality even apart from the rarity of its gender and class position. She also wrote a completed tragedy and part of another, and letters which evaluate her own situation with remarkable perception.
Connections
| Connections Sort descending | Author name | Excerpt |
|---|---|---|
| Friends, Associates | Elizabeth Carter | EC
associated on terms of warmth and equality with men of letters or culture such as Samuel Johnson
, Samuel Richardson
, Thomas Birch
, Moses Browne
, Richard Savage
, William
and John Duncombe |
| Friends, Associates | Elizabeth Montagu | EM
was involved in many other subscription efforts, including those for Mary Leapor
in 1751, Anne Penny
in 1771, and Mary Sewell
(for a book which appeared in 1803, after her death). Guest, Harriet. Small Change: Women, Learning, Patriotism, 1750-1810. University of Chicago Press, 2000. 90n31 |
| Literary responses | Mary Jones | Catherine Talbot
found Holt Waters and A Letter to Doctor Pitt indelicate and was surprised that Carter
liked MJ
's poetry. Kennedy, Deborah. Poetic Sisters. Early Eighteenth-Century Women Poets. Bucknell University Press, 2013. 183 |
| Occupation | Frances Seymour, Countess of Hertford | Among writers who received Lady Hertford's patronage were Elizabeth Singer Rowe
, Elizabeth Boyd
, Elizabeth Carter
, Mary Chandler
, Isaac Watts
, Laurence Eusden
(for whom she set topics of occasional poems), James Thomson |
| politics | Sarah Scott | They believed that women could think and write in freedom only outside relationships with men. Although Mary Astell
's writing influenced them, they insisted that women must be involved in society and not withdraw into... |
| Textual Features | Ann Candler | The conditions of AC
's life left her no chance of emulating the feisty tone of earlier women poets of the same social rank. Mary Collier
and Mary Leapor
had no dependents and were able... |
| Textual Features | Dorothea Du Bois | After seven pages on grammar, she offers pattern letters: those in verse are in effect an anthology of epistolary poems by women, a patriotically generous selection of Irish writers (Mary Monck
, Mary Barber |
| Textual Features | Martha Fowke | Her poems here include Clio's Picture, where she presents herself as erotically attractive but not as conventionally beautiful, largely because she is not fair but dark. (Mary Leapor
was to do something similar... |
| Textual Features | Mary Russell Mitford | MRM
has no patience with Laetitia-Matilda Hawkins
's The Countess and Gertrude or with Byron
's Childe Harold. Mitford, Mary Russell. The Life of Mary Russell Mitford: Told by Herself in Letters To Her Friends. L’Estrange, Alfred Guy KinghamEditor , Harper and Brothers, 1870. 1: 133, 152 |
| Textual Features | Isabella Whitney | In A Communication to London she mentions her unrequited fondness for the city. (As she had assumed the role of jilted woman she here assumes the role of the woman whose maltreatment by her love-object... |
| Theme or Topic Treated in Text | Mary Seymour Montague | The third epistle performs the conventional act of praising historical women: the monarchs Elizabeth I
and Catherine the Great
of Russia for their exercise of power, the French scholar Anne Dacier
, and eleven British... |
Timeline
1764
German labouring-class poet Anna Luise Karsch
first reached print with four separate publications at Berlin, most importantly a collection, Auserlesene Gedichte (edited for publication by J. G. Sulzer
).
January 1781-December 1782
The Lady's Poetical Magazine, or Beauties of British Poetry appeared, published by James Harrison
in four half-yearly numbers; it is arguable whether or not it kept the first number's promise of generous selections of work...