Women’s Writing in the British Isles from the Beginnings to the Present
Ann Yearsley
-
Standard Name: Yearsley, Ann
Birth Name: Ann Cromartie
Married Name: Ann Yearsley
Pseudonym: The Milkwoman
Nickname: Lactilla, or the Bristol Milkwoman
AY
became famous at the outset of her career as a primitive or untaught poet: a role she herself rejected in the course of a bitter row with her patron Hannah More
. She went on to publish without the help of patrons, and to add a play and a novel to her poetry. Her letters remained unpublished. Though actually far from uneducated (she packs her poems with literary allusions), she is a writer who lays less emphasis on formal structures or conventions than on sturdy individualism and on the Romantic outpouring of emotion.
HM
embarked on helping Ann Yearsley
in the terrible winter of 1783-4, when the Yearsley family were near destitution. Charity modulated into literary patronage over the year 1784, as More brought Yearsley to the attention...
Literary responses
Phillis Wheatley
Much initial response to PW
as a poet saw her as a freak, a curiosity, or a political argument. A typical reviewer found her work merely imitative, without endemial marks of solar fire or...
Literary responses
Christian Milne
CM
knew from harsh experience that for a labouring-class woman, publishing poems invited personal criticism (as Elizabeth Hands
in England had understood). She says she met with encouragement from patrons but that her neighbours assumed...
Literary responses
Anna Letitia Barbauld
Recently William McCarthy
has pronounced this poem seldom matched for conceptual density. (He cites as its peers in this respect Johnson
's The Vanity of Human Wishes and Ann Yearsley
's Addressed to Ignorance.)
McCarthy, William. Anna Letitia Barbauld, Voice of the Enlightenment. The Johns Hopkins University Press.
475
Literary responses
Mary Whateley Darwall
Before the appearance of her first book, Mary Whateley was celebrated by a Walsall poet, Stephen Chatterton
, for excelling Sappho
's odes. During the same period, in 1861, the Gentleman's Magazine published an exaggerated...
Leisure and Society
Mariana Starke
MS
and her family were great supporters of literature through the subscription system. She subscribed in 1781 to Anne Francis
's Poetical Translation of the Song of Solomon, from the original Hebrew, which was...
Intertextuality and Influence
Elizabeth Isabella Spence
She begins with Wales (whose countryside she praises but whose peasants she fairly sweepingly dismisses).
Spence, Elizabeth Isabella. Summer Excursions. Longman, Hurst, Rees, and Orme.
1: 24-5
Although her title-page does not name it, she returned to Wales on a later journey, and devotes a...
Friends, Associates
Eliza Fletcher
Eliza Dawson set herself to achieve a real friendship with Yearsley
, who however was touchy about it, and took it on herself to lecture Eliza about her taste for novels, condemning them as the...
Friends, Associates
Elizabeth Montagu
EM
supported her friend Hannah More
in organizing subscriptions for Ann Yearsley
's Poems, on Several Occasions.
Myers, Sylvia Harcstark. The Bluestocking Circle: Women, Friendship, and the Life of the Mind in Eighteenth-Century England. Clarendon.
The first volume had a frontispiece designed by AMP
's brother R. K. Porter
. The epigraph came from the introduction to Gay
's Fables (1727) : From objects most minute and mean, / A...
