Thomas Ken

AF enjoyed personal friendships with a number of distinguished men, among them Bishop Thomas Ken . She valued female friendship very highly; women friends figure prominently in her poetry. Lady Catherine Jones , to whom...

Love Thou Art Best of Human Joys, a song by AF with music by Purcell first heard in 1693, was sung at Frome in Somerset at a service marking the three hundredth anniversary of...

The young Frances Thynne grew up in a literary ambience. Her early friends included Frances Worsley, later Lady Carteret (who apparently patronised women writers later, when her husband was Viceroy of Ireland). Family friends from...

By mid-1734, EJ , in debt because of her divorced husband 's failure to pay her maintenance, took a job as governess to the three daughters of Hill Evans , a British merchant who lived...

She briefly recapiculates details from her previously-described Russian experience: the way she made herself popular with the sailors by getting rum added to their tea; her teaching use of hymns like Awake my soul and...

After Cowper, EMdid the poet George Herbert in Under Salisbury Spire, in the Days of George Herbert, the Recollections of Magdalene Wydville and the diarist Margaret Hoby in Eventide Light; or, Passages in the...

This contains one of her best-known pieces, For a Child Expected, which begins: Lovers whose lifted hands are candles in winter, and continues through all that our passion would yield / We put to...

ESR enjoyed important friendships from around the age of twenty with Anne Finch, Lady Winchilsea , and Lady Hertford . Finch was twelve years older than ESR , and Hertford twenty-five years younger. They each...