Women’s Writing in the British Isles from the Beginnings to the Present
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.
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).
Feminist Companion Archive.
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
The collection was warmly praised by Ralph Griffiths
in the Monthly Review:...
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...
Mitford, Mary Russell. The Life of Mary Russell Mitford: Told by Herself in Letters To Her Friends. Editor L’Estrange, Alfred Guy Kingham, Harper and Brothers, 1870.
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...
Texts
Leapor, Mary. “Introduction”. Poems, edited by Ann Messenger and Richard Greene, 2003.
Leapor, Mary. Poems upon Several Occasions. J. Roberts, 1751.
