Mary Leapor

26 February 1722 - 14 November 1746

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.

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Connections

Connections Sort descending	Author name	Excerpt
Friends, Associates	Elizabeth Carter	EC associated on terms of warmth and equality with men of letters or culture such as Samuel Johnson , Samuel Richardson , Thomas Birch , Moses Browne , Richard Savage , William and John Duncombe
Friends, Associates	Elizabeth Montagu	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:...
Occupation	Frances Seymour Countess of Hertford	Among writers who received Lady Hertford's patronage were Elizabeth Singer Rowe , Elizabeth Boyd , Elizabeth Carter , Mary Chandler , Isaac Watts , Laurence Eusden (for whom she set topics of occasional poems), James Thomson
politics	Sarah Scott	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...
Textual Features	Isabella Whitney	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...
Textual Features	Mary Russell Mitford	MRM has no patience with Laetitia-Matilda Hawkins 's The Countess and Gertrude or with Byron 's Childe Harold. 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, 2 vols. 1: 133, 152 She despises Stéphanie-Félicité de Genlis as a delightful mixture of cant and affectation...
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 ).

OCLC WorldCat. 1992–1998, http://www.oclc.org/firstsearch/content/worldcat/. Accessed 1999.

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, 2 vols.