Jane Cave

JC , eighteenth-century poet, has not received the critical attention merited by her literary ability. She is remarkable for the number of provincial centres in which she published. Having married an exciseman, she lived a peripatetic life, and seems to have issued a new and often revised edition of her one collection of poems in almost every place she lived at. Her work includes religious poems, epitaphs, hymns, and lively social and political commentary: about a hundred poems in her five successive editions. An extraordinary, recently identified collection of mixed prose and verse relates an intensely painful episode in her marriage.