Jonathan Swift

Against the trend of the times, RS aimed for historical interest rather than literary canonicity, compiling in his Specimens of the Later English Poets a collection of representative voices rather than a garland: The taste...

Her first poem, an Introductory Address to the Muse, uses the language of love and courtship: In secret shades alone I woo'd thee then / By stealth, nor to the world durst tell my love...

Along with the sentimental and misunderstanding-prone lovers and the ridiculous esprit circle (which might so easily be taken to represent the Bluestockings), The Witlings features a women's working environment: a milliner's shop where seamstresses make...

Her topics here, all relevant to the escalating American demands for independence, are the declining economy, rising prices, and an oppressive burden of taxes. She was entering a debate previously carried on among such...

She explains that having waited four months for Swift to answer her marriage proposal—still in love with him, having rejected other suitors for his sake, admiring his power of raillery, forgiving his harshness to women...

She had rich material to draw from because her father, John Sinclair (1754-1835), was an unusually accomplished man who was very active in public life. Most notably, he conceived and undertook the publication of The...

The Elixir of Life opens with the waking vision of a man and woman in their summer prime, he looking like Apollo, she looking like an angel with just a touch of the siren or...

EH 's fictional Swift is widely unlike the original, especially in prose style.

Fidelia defends herself against the suspicion of being a male in disguise: I feign my name, but not my sex. She keeps up the fantasy of her love for Swift , assuring...

This book is often seen as a sequel, and it retails the same type of scandal as the New Atalantis, but without the supernatural mediating characters. It too purports to be translated: this time...

Her editor Elizabeth Mavor , however, prints a late poem (which MC herself called jingling doggerel), written for a family magazine produced by some young nephews and nieces, which is anything but sapless in...

One common element shared by DM 's writing in different genres (plays, fiction, non-fiction) is its targeted sensationalim and deliberate artistic excess. Another is its partisan political content. Swift , who approved her very generous...

It is a poem highly characteristic of her manner: a moral tale featuring a personified quality, humorous, ironic, and written in octosyllabic couplets reminiscent of Swift or Prior . Prudence and Oeconomy are the daughters...

She trod a fine line as to the expression of her own feelings, for if the courtship should not end in marriage, she would have compromised her reputation. She converts this restriction into a rhetorical...

The opening poem, Nothing New, situates the anxieties of authors in regard to critics in the tradition of anxieties of lovers: both are right to be anxious. The contents include an English translation of...