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 Her letters remained unpublished.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.
Eliza Dawson (later EF
) sent to Ann Yearsley
a poetic epistle whose topics included despair (apparently ascribing that emotion to Yearsley).
Waldron, Mary. “A Different Kind of Patronage: Ann Yearsley’s Later Friends”. The Age of Johnson, edited by Paul J. Korshin and Jack Lynch, Vol.
13
, AMS Press, pp. 283-35.
307
Occupation
Eliza Fletcher
This friendship was built on a shared interest in literature, in patronising the poor or socially oppressed who aspired to writing, in encouraging inoculation and in promoting Sunday schools. Eliza was interested particularly in the...
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...
Travel
Eliza Fletcher
Independent-minded as she was, EF
faced restrictions on her activities as an unmarried girl. She had been taken on a tour of the Scottish Highlands in 1786, but now when she badly wanted to travel...
politics
Eliza Fletcher
EF
's patronage of writers was bound up with her political views as an abolitionist: in March 1788 she was actively circulating for sale Ann Yearsley
's A Poem on the Inhumanity of the Slave...
Theme or Topic Treated in Text
Eliza Fletcher
The correspondence concerned books read, benevolent schemes undertaken (some having to do with inoculation or with Sunday schools), and particularly efforts to secure a career and literary income for the poet Ann Yearsley
.
Waldron, Mary. “A Different Kind of Patronage: Ann Yearsley’s Later Friends”. The Age of Johnson, edited by Paul J. Korshin and Jack Lynch, Vol.
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...
Textual Features
Mary Maria Colling
As its extended title suggests, the book is prefaced by three letters from Bray to Southey. The correspondence provided the Poet Laureate with MMC
's life history, as well as examples of her poems. The...
Textual Production
Jane Cave
Twenty people were killed in this episode, which happened on 30 September. The pamphlets containing JC
's poem survive in Bristol Central Reference Library
.
Schürer, Norbert. “Jane Cave Winscom: Provincial Poetry and the Metropolitan Connection”. Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies, Vol.
36
, No. 3, pp. 415-31.
421n37
It was duly added to her next collection. Ann Yearsley
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.
