Mary Leapor

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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.

Milestones

26 February 1722

ML was born at Marston St Lawrence in Northamptonshire.
Greene, Richard. Mary Leapor: A Study in Eighteenth-Century Women’s Poetry. Clarendon Press.
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Just before 14 November 1746

ML died of measles at Brackley.
Greene, Richard. Mary Leapor: A Study in Eighteenth-Century Women’s Poetry. Clarendon Press.
22

April 1748

The subscribers received copies of the first volume of ML 's Poems upon Several Occasions, posthumously published for the benefit of her father.
Greene, Richard. Mary Leapor: A Study in Eighteenth-Century Women’s Poetry. Clarendon Press.
25, 225

Biography

Birth and Family

26 February 1722

ML was born at Marston St Lawrence in Northamptonshire.
Greene, Richard. Mary Leapor: A Study in Eighteenth-Century Women’s Poetry. Clarendon Press.
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