Frances Greville

The contents are part new, part reprinted. SK notes this in Remarks of the Author, which admits the claims of good taste but declares that fantastic imagination too has its place. She writes in...

Unlike curst apathy, she writes, contemplation can raise the seed which Virtue sows, / From Folly's blights the tender plant defend, / 'Till vigorous as the towering oak it grows.

She has a sharp eye for gender issues, including those surrounding domestic work. The Housewife's Prayer is addressed to Economy, a name which might be loosely translated as balancing the budget, and ends with the...

More takes a sceptical view of sensibility: she reproves both the representation of it in Goethe 's Werther (which had been available in English for about three years) and the sentimental enthusiasm which the book...

These poems include political subject-matter, for instance in the celebratory Ode to the President, On his visiting the Northern States. This addresses Washington as Columbia's guardian God, who emulates and surpasses the military...

EP follows in the tradition of Richardson , both in her general scheme and in details like an incident involving a male character and his kept mistress. At the outset each of the central friends...

Her own poems in this volume cover a wide range of moods. A piece written against Stoicism sounds like an answer to Frances Greville 's prayer for indifference as the speaker (who has a fickle...

From The WorldMR moved on to a rival periodical, The Oracle, to which she contributed fairy poems as Oberon—a name which perhaps owes something to Frances Greville 's famous Ode to Indifference...

This includes her Ode to Rapture (reprinted from The Oracle, later omitted from her posthumous volume), which her editor Judith Pascoe calls her most direct treatment of sexual passion. It invokes Frances Greville

Contents include lives of Elizabeth Singer Rowe and of Mary Wollstonecraft (the latter reprinted from the Monthly Visitor of London). Among the poems (some of them specifically attributed to SHR ) are one entitled...

A Letter to Miss E.B. on Marriage comments acutely on the conduct-book market: every He that writes claims a superior recipe for form[ing] the tender virgin's mind. Their recipes all boil down to...

The chapter headings quote a range of canonical or contemporary writers, including Shakespeare , Milton , Pope , Thomson , Goldsmith , William Mason , John Langhorne , Burns , Erasmus Darwin , Edward Young

Choice of women writers is fairly generous, with excerpts from Hester Mulso Chapone , John Aikin and Anna Letitia Barbauld (Evenings at Home), Susanna Haswell Rowson , Elizabeth Carter , Hester Thrale ,...

Ann Ford told her father she was properly grateful for the education he had given her. He claimed that he had spent four hundred pounds a year or more on it. Susannah Cibber ...

About a quarter of the poems here are sonnets; a similar proportion are translations or imitations. Some are attributed to characters in Tighe's unpublished novel Selena; others describe places Tighe had visited, or express...