Judith Cowper Madan

26 August 1702 - 07 December 1781

Standard Name: Madan, Judith Cowper

Birth Name: Judith Cowper

Married Name: Judith Madan

Used Form: Judith Cowper Madan

Pseudonym: Mrs Judith C—p—r

JCM (formerly Judith Cowper), like almost all of her relations, was a frequent writer of occasional poetry. Most of her surviving poems, and all the major ones, date from about 1720-8, that is from either before or not long after her marriage. She writes in some ambitious forms (a survey of world poetry, an Ovidian epistle, erotic love-poetry), and shows herself sensitive to gender issues, but even in satire she voices only the most muted rebellion, showing herself happiest and most fluent in celebration and deference.

Rumbold, Valerie. “The Poetic Career of Judith Cowper: An Exemplary Failure?”. Pope, Swift, and Women Writers, edited by Donald C. Mell, University of Delaware Press, pp. 48-66.

Full profile

Connections

Connections Sort descending	Author name	Excerpt
Anthologization	Mary Chandler	Miscellaneous Poems by Several Hands, an anthology edited by James Ralph , included some works by MC (as well as one by Judith Madan ). Foxon, David F. English Verse 1701-1750. Cambridge University Press. OCLC WorldCat. http://www.oclc.org/firstsearch/content/worldcat/. Accessed 1999.
Family and Intimate relationships	Sarah, Lady Cowper	After Samuel, who died at a few months old, and John, who died before the age of twenty, SLC 's youngest son was Spencer Cowper (23 February 1670‐1728), who became a lawyer almost as distinguished...
Fictionalization	Héloïse	Since then she has remained a favourite subject for fiction (generally in her role as mistress rather than writer or churchwoman). Alexander Pope spread her reputation considerably when he borrowed her voice for his popular...
Friends, Associates	Alexander Pope	Pope's relationships with women, particularly women who wrote, tended to be complicated and turbulent. They have been ably studied by scholar Valerie Rumbold . Contrary to rumour, he apparently liked and respected Anne Finch ...
Friends, Associates	Mariana Starke	From at least the late 1770s MS and her family were on terms of close friendship with Eliza and William Hayley ; Mariana's earliest extant letter to Eliza Hayley is dated 22 December 1780. William...
Friends, Associates	Jane Brereton	In her youth JB knew Thomas Beach, who grew up at Wrexham, in the same district as herself (and later joined in the same verse exchanges in the Gentleman's Magazine), and probably...
Friends, Associates	Mary Caesar	MC shared her husband's network of high-level connections in circles of Jacobites and Jacobite sympathisers. She was a friend of the writers Pope , Prior , Swift , and Mary Barber , and of the...
Intertextuality and Influence	Sappho	Sappho 's name was an honorific for women writers for generations. George Puttenham may have been the first to use it to compliment a writing woman: in Parthienades, 1579, he said that Queen Elizabeth
Intertextuality and Influence	Anna Seward	Even her few pages here consist chiefly of quotations from others: from Pope 's Eloisa to Abelard, Judith Cowper 's Abelard to Eloisa, and Abelard's own Letter to Philanthus.
Publishing	Jane Brereton	During her early years in London with her husband, Thomas Brereton , JB not only wrote but printed poems. Some appeared in the Whitehall Evening-Post: for example To the Author of the Progress of...
Publishing	Anne Francis	She quoted Pindar in Greek on the title page, and dedicated the work in a full-page inscription to John Parkhurst of Epsom, author of a Hebrew lexicon, Matthew, Henry Colin Gray et al., editors. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. http://www.oxforddnb.com/. as a small testament to his merit, and...
Publishing	Héloïse	Hughes's first edition, 1713, was already equipped with a prefatory account of the lives of its protagonists, which weds their texts to the fictionalised tradition about them. It has in turn been edited by James E. Wellington
Textual Features	Sylvia Kantaris	This volume, through its title, invokes a whole tradition of women's poetry. Sappho was the first to bear the honorific nickname of tenth muse, which was later freely bestowed on writing women (like Anna Maria van Schurman
Textual Production	Lady Mary Wortley Montagu	Throughout the 1720 LMWM regularly responded in poetry to events in her social circle. She wrote on an alleged incident of attempted rape; on the deaths of the Duke of Marlborough , William Congreve ...
Textual Production	Lady Hester Pulter	One poem celebrates an incident from 1646: a young royalist lady whose beloved had died in battle refused to live without him and shot herself dead with a pistol. Pulter, Lady Hester. Poems, Emblems, and The Unfortunate Florinda. Editor Eardley, Alice, Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies . 143-6 The first title of the...

Timeline

1628

Publication began of the legal treatise known to later generations as Coke upon Littleton: The first part of the Institutes of the Lawes of England, or a Commentarie upon Littleton by jurist Sir Edward Coke .

28 March 1762

Preaching at the opening of a chapel at the LondonLock Hospital (for sexually transmitted disease) the Rev. Martin Madan pointed the finger at men who knowingly infect children.

January 1781-December 1782

The Lady's Poetical Magazine, or Beauties of British Poetry appeared, published by James Harrison in four half-yearly numbers; it is arguable whether or not it kept the first number's promise of generous selections of work...

Texts

Madan, Judith Cowper, and William Pattison. “Abelard to Eloisa”. The Poetical Works, edited by Lucasia and Lucasia, Curll, 1727, pp. 67-77.

Madan, Judith Cowper, and John Hughes. “Abelard to Eloisa”. Letters of Abelard and Heloise, Eleventh, 1773, pp. 178-83.

Madan, Judith Cowper. “The Progress of Poetry”. The Flower-Piece, edited by Matthew Concanen, Walthoe, 1731, pp. 130-40.

Madan, Judith Cowper. The Progress of Poetry. Dodsley, 1783.