John Wilmot, second Earl of Rochester

The book was handsomely produced, having a decorated dedication page, and a frontispiece featuring an oval portrait (or fictitious portrait) of Ephelia, with a heraldic badge above the picture and a pedestal bearing her engraved...

GG has published a good deal in her scholarly field of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century women's writing. Her anthology (with Susan Hastings , Jeslyn Medoff and Melinda Sansone ), Kissing the Rod, has played an...

AB marked Rochester 's early death with an elegy warmly praising his poetry and his charisma.

The printed edition has a preface which repudiates Lucretius, whose work in the original the translator now believes to be harmful to its readers. With the five reprinted cantos David Norbrook prints fifteen more, which...

AB 's poems were mostly opportunistic in some way, seizing the chances offered her, either by projects of literary colleagues or by royal or other grand occasions, to make some money. She makes much use...

Letters from KP began appearing in print with Familiar Letters written by Lord Rochester and others; four further compilations followed before 1700.

Lucy Walter (who had become a fictional heroine early, in Marie-Catherine d'Aulnoy 's Memoirs of the Court of England, 1695, and was soon to be treated by Elizabeth Goudge in The Child from the...

AW wrote an elegy on the death of her uncle Rochester .

AW voiced, in To Mrs. A. Behn, On what she Writ of the Earl of Rochester, delight at Behn 's fame and the honour it conferred on women.

Not all the poems in the volume are written in Ephelia's voice (which adds an extra dimension to argument over the ascription of those written in other voices). It seems that Ephelia enjoyed ventriloquizing the...

It opens in France and England during what was in England the interregnum period, and moves onwards into the reign of Charles II . The heroine writes her story retrospectively in a letter to a...

Lucretius , as a pagan philosopher and theologian (and, as LH and her contemporaries believed, insane much of the time and sexually promiscuous), was a daring choice for one of her religious opinions.

The poem belongs to a contemporary sub-genre describing masculine sexual failure, but such poems are generally written (like the well-known one by Rochester ) from a male viewpoint. It is fast-moving and funny. It lusciously...

The plot owes something to Charlotte Lennox 's Female Quixote. The father of Green's heroine has lived through many crazes for novelists: first Burney , then Radcliffe , then Owenson , then Rosa Matilda

BP began this novel as a story about Hilary and me as spinsters of fiftyish—that is, about a then unimaginable future. Its dry humour and irony, its concentration on middle-aged spinsters, clergy, and the...