William Cowper

It carried a dedication, dated 10 May, to Cowper , who had read and revised a draft.

At home her mother had read to her daughters, while they sewed, Greek and Roman history, and writers like Pope , and Cowper . At four Anna could recite long passages from Milton 's L'Allegro...

At a very young age, JR imagined that God was a book. She was so slow to read that her parents were concerned, but then suddenly found herself able to read even the longer words...

She could read by four-and-a-half, and recalls an early admiration for hymns by Anna Letitia Barbauld and Maria Edgeworth . Julius Cæsar, the first Shakespearean play that she saw, left a lasting impression. Later...

MTL was educated in France at an Ursuline convent school. She later undertook further study in Italy. She consequently became familiar with both French and Italian. From her writings it is clear...

Sarah Josepha Buell (later SJH ) was taught at home by her mother, with her father and her brother Horatio (then a law student) joining in for such higher branches of learning as writing, Latin...

At a very early age Emma Martin could recite See'st thou my home is where yon woods are waving by Felicia Hemans . After leaving school she continued to study music with Dr Zacariah or Zechariah Buck

JI was educated at home by her mother and an unmarried aunt . She was occasionally instructed by the masters employed to teach the boys of the family. Her mother's curriculum centred on religion but...

The Cowper family, many of whose male members distinguished themselves in the law and in politics, used a confusing amount of repetition in naming their children in successive generations. Almost a majority of JCM 's...

JCM 's nephew William Cowper the poet, with whom she corresponded, took an interest in her work and was probably the channel through which her poems reached the anthologists Colman and Thornton .

MS was probably a friend from an early age of the dissenting hymn-writer Anne Steele , who lived not very far away and who was a generation older. They spent much time together in 1773...

On a month-long visit to William Hayley , CS met the poet Cowper , his friend Mary Unwin , and the painter George Romney .

Chapters are headed with a lavish array of quotations. Among the better-known authors are Ariosto (in the original), Shakespeare , Drayton , Milton , Pope (on the title-page), Young , Gray , Collins , Johnson

In a critical preface HS reveals her gender though not her name. She opens by invoking the author of Rienzi (either, Mary Russell Mitford or Edward Bulwer Lytton ). The two groups of lovers and...

The Author's Introduction is followed by one hundred short poems divided into two sections, which variously treat the central themes of mortality, impermanence, or the saving grace of Christianity. The poems are predominantly but not...