Mary Leapor

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Standard Name: Leapor, Mary
Birth Name: Mary Leapor
Nickname: Molly
Pseudonym: Myra
Pseudonym: A Gardener's Daughter
The poetry of the labouring-class ML (who died before she was thirty) remakes standard Augustan conventions from an outsider's point of view. This poetry would be important for its sheer literary quality even apart from the rarity of its gender and class position. She also wrote a completed tragedy and part of another, and letters which evaluate her own situation with remarkable perception.

Connections

Connections Sort descending Author name Excerpt
Friends, Associates Elizabeth Montagu
EM was involved in many other subscription efforts, including those for Mary Leapor in 1751, Anne Penny in 1771, and Mary Sewell (for a book which appeared in 1803, after her death).
Feminist Companion Archive.
Guest, Harriet. Small Change: Women, Learning, Patriotism, 1750-1810. University of Chicago Press, 2000.
90n31
Friends, Associates Elizabeth Carter
EC associated on terms of warmth and equality with men of letters or culture such as Samuel Johnson , Samuel Richardson , Thomas Birch , Moses Browne , Richard Savage , William and John Duncombe
Literary responses Mary Jones
Catherine Talbot found Holt Waters and A Letter to Doctor Pitt indelicate and was surprised that Carter liked MJ 's poetry.
Kennedy, Deborah. Poetic Sisters. Early Eighteenth-Century Women Poets. Bucknell University Press, 2013.
183
The collection was warmly praised by Ralph Griffiths in the Monthly Review:...
Occupation Frances Seymour Countess of Hertford
Among writers who received Lady Hertford's patronage were Elizabeth Singer Rowe , Elizabeth Boyd , Elizabeth Carter , Mary Chandler , Isaac Watts , Laurence Eusden (for whom she set topics of occasional poems), James Thomson
politics Sarah Scott
They believed that women could think and write in freedom only outside relationships with men. Although Mary Astell 's writing influenced them, they insisted that women must be involved in society and not withdraw into...
Textual Features Isabella Whitney
In A Communication to London she mentions her unrequited fondness for the city. (As she had assumed the role of jilted woman she here assumes the role of the woman whose maltreatment by her love-object...
Textual Features Mary Russell Mitford
MRM has no patience with Laetitia-Matilda Hawkins 's The Countess and Gertrude or with Byron 's Childe Harold.
Mitford, Mary Russell. The Life of Mary Russell Mitford: Told by Herself in Letters To Her Friends. Editor L’Estrange, Alfred Guy Kingham, Harper and Brothers, 1870, 2 vols.
1: 133, 152
She despises Stéphanie-Félicité de Genlis as a delightful mixture of cant and affectation...
Textual Features Ann Candler
The conditions of AC 's life left her no chance of emulating the feisty tone of earlier women poets of the same social rank. Mary Collier and Mary Leapor had no dependents and were able...
Textual Features Dorothea Du Bois
After seven pages on grammar, she offers pattern letters: those in verse are in effect an anthology of epistolary poems by women, a patriotically generous selection of Irish writers (Mary Monck , Mary Barber
Textual Features Martha Fowke
Her poems here include Clio's Picture, where she presents herself as erotically attractive but not as conventionally beautiful, largely because she is not fair but dark. (Mary Leapor was to do something similar...
Theme or Topic Treated in Text Mary Seymour Montague
The third epistle performs the conventional act of praising historical women: the monarchs Elizabeth I and Catherine the Great of Russia for their exercise of power, the French scholar Anne Dacier , and eleven British...

Timeline

1764: German labouring-class poet Anna Luise Karsch...

Writing climate item

1764

German labouring-class poet Anna Luise Karsch first reached print with four separate publications at Berlin, most importantly a collection, Auserlesene Gedichte (edited for publication by J. G. Sulzer ).
OCLC WorldCat. 1992–1998, http://www.oclc.org/firstsearch/content/worldcat/. Accessed 1999.

January 1781-December 1782: The Lady's Poetical Magazine, or Beauties...

Writing climate item

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

Leapor, Mary. “Introduction”. Poems, edited by Ann Messenger and Richard Greene, 2003.
Leapor, Mary. Poems upon Several Occasions. J. Roberts, 1751, 2 vols.