John Dryden

She praised Creech's version (the first available in English) as making ancient learning available to women, whose education (according to the scanted Customs of the Nation) keeps women from reading great writers...

She notes that poets have lived difficult and unappreciated lives, and that many have been forgotten. Quoting a remark by Pope (that time, which has made Chaucer unintelligible, will one day do the same with...

M. G. Lewis is a more complicated case, treated with some nuance. SG admires The Monk but feels that after that Lewis's real talent was obscured by the baneful influence of German fiction: she agrees...

Its boldness in argument—seeking to lift women to an Equallity [sic] with men—may stem from its anonymity. It is also interesting as literary criticism, notably on Dryden , Wycherley , Congreve , and Locke

Her poetry as a whole is conspicuous for its versatility. Her major early influences (Katherine Philips and Abraham Cowley ) were succeeded by Dryden . (She always denied any influence from Pope .) But...

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...

Lucretius , as a pagan philosopher and theologian (and, as LH and her contemporaries believed, insane much of the time and sexually promiscuous), was a daring choice for one of her religious opinions.

In some sense, therefore, she dictated the terms of the anthology. Its full title was The Virgin Muse: Being a Collection of Poems from our Most Celebrated English Poets, designed for the use of...

This was not the first dictionary of English, but its predecessors had remained more or less close to the model of a word-list, omitting common words or any attempt to distinguish one idiomatic usage from...

An Argument explains the poem's source in Plutarch. AF 's hero, whose father was an associate of Alexander the Great , is dead after many vicissitudes. His ashes make a triumphal progress by sea from...

It is difficult to summarise AB 's immense and complex importance for the history of women's writing. Virginia Woolf said she deserved from all women a tribute of flowers because she was the first to...

AK (also a painter) was a fine Restoration-period poet, who has the misfortune of being better known for Dryden 's praises of her than for her actual work.

ET (dubbed Corinna by Dryden and writing mostly in the early eighteenth century) was a poet of real stature and an interesting letter-writer. Her few authentic works have been upstaged by the many miscellaneous writings...

An amateur performance at Court of Dryden 's The Indian Emperor used a prologue which AB included in her Covent Garden Drolery, but probably did not write.

AF was a constant source of scenes, burlesques, and improvisations for performance by the Women's Liberation Street Theatre Group . She also wrote for a number of underground or radical papers: Ink, Islington Gutter...