Jonathan Swift

Fidelia reappeared in the Gentleman's Magazine with To a young Gentleman who had a fine Genius for Poetry, but who upon reading Mr Pope's and Dr Swift's Works, declined writing.

MB's campaign to raise subscribers for her Poems on Several Occasions was well under way: Swift wrote to her about its progress on 23 February 1731.

The title-page said 1686. The frontispiece is an engraving from one of AK's two painted self-portraits. Jonathan Swift had a copy in his library. During the twenty-first century, copies of this handsome little book...

Today DM's stock is high, but she is less studied than many of her contemporaries. Her choice of genres and her close involvement with the political and other affairs of her time make her...

This poem was considered one of CC's best works. It was praised by Mary Russell Mitford, and George Saintsbury noted its originality (though the passage on the dead wit and writer searching...

Love in Excess, with its arguably six editions by 1725, has repeatedly been likened to Daniel Defoe Robinson Crusoe and Jonathan Swift Gulliver's Travels as bestselling English fictions before Pamela. It has never shared their status, partly...

LP's work was included in Poems by Eminent Ladies, 1755. But it was also traduced in catchpenny publications like The Celebrated Mrs. Pilkington's Jests; or, The Cabinet of Wit and Humour, 1759...

Her poem to Lord Carteret concerns a work probably by Swift. The publication addressed to Lady Carteret (actually consisting of one poem to her and one to her daughter) shows a strong sense of...

Each apology begins with a cliché like To tell you the truth—, or Don't mind me, dear—. One point of the joke (as in Swift's Polite Conversation, 1738) is the flatness and inadequacy...

MR's own twenty poems include prefatory verses as editor, written for the occasion. She prints work by the late Henrietta O'Neill (the well-known Ode to the Poppy), Georgiana Duchess of Devonshire (St...

The Art of Tormenting is often referred to as a novel, but its genre is really that of the spoof instruction manual: the genre of Pope's The Art of Sinking in Poetry and Swift

Here she extols Delany's virtues in the voice of the goddess who hates and resents them (and who is presumed to be behind the recent attacks on Delany stemming from his friendship with Swift)...

The unnamed male narrator describes himself as a foreigner, but has lived in London long enough to be mistaken for an Englishman. In the end he reveals himself to be an inhabitant of Japan...

This novel provides a satirical portrait of high society in early eighteenth-century England. It centres on Henrietta, Countess of Marchmont, an upper-class orphan enduring a loveless marriage and imperilled by her first visit to...

EB offers original, discriminating praise for women's writing: Susanna Centlivre (her inspiration, she says), Eliza Haywood (though she regrets her exposure of women's faults), Aphra Behn, and Delarivier Manley, whom she calls the...