Alexander Pope

For centuries LMWM has been interpreted and re-interpreted, judged less often as writer than as an exemplar of the unacceptable female. Her fame and/or notoriety flourished during her lifetime, and posthumous publications kept it alive...

Pope attacked LMWM 's husband 's business practices in his Epistle to Lord Bathurst.

Jane, a widow whose only child is dead, decides to marry again, and picks the young Marquess of Montrath, heir to an earldom, whom she has first seen as a fellow visitor to the spunging-house...

The story follows its hero's unsurprising metamorphosis: he begins as the socially negligible James Treton, an orphan, assistant in an accoucheurs' and surgeon-apothecaries' practice, and ends as Arthur, Duke of Avon. It opens with nicely...

The novel which emerged from so much interference during composition is naive, exaggerated, and badly structured, but highly unusual, with great intensity in its writing. Its title-page quotes Thomas Holcroft , and its epigraphs to...

MM published by subscription her Poems on Several Occasions: the first volume of poems in English by a woman to be issued this way. Her surviving letters show that she put a lot of...

Her preface says that she cannot (like one of Pope 's dunces) plead request of friends as an excuse for publishing. She explains that she planned her work in the course of rambling through the...

FM published At Heart a Rake, a novel whose title comes from a famous pronouncement by Alexander Pope about the secret essence of every woman.

The elderly lady, Lady Arabella, represents a chilly view of the English aristocracy. She opens her story with a paean in praise of past times and in dispraise of the present: How interminably long the...

The fictitious narrator begins by observing that while some may consider the story of someone of her station devoid of interest, she has been in contact all her life with cultivated ladies of the highest...

The Atalantis was read in several conflicting ways. Pope used it in his Rape of the Lock to exemplify the brief reading fads of the fashionable female world which was drawn to it because it...

Swift also, like his erstwhile allies Addison and Steele , was spurred by DM 's example to consternation over women's growing political activity. Though he was personally her friend, Swift undoubtedly aimed partly at her...

Five hundred of JCM 's letters survive in manuscript. The correspondence between her and her husband both before and after marriage (about 350 letters, from 13 October 1723) is held by the Bodleian Library (MS...

Her courtship letters, says Rumbold, are insecure, unhappy, and demanding. She later sometimes discussed books with her husband: she admired Richardson 's Pamela for its power over the emotions and also its power to...

JCM reaped a good deal of praise during her lifetime, but most of it must have been of questionable value to her as a poet. Pope 's To Erinna is typical in casting her as...