John Dryden

The reception of this volume, dictated by Gethin's position as her father's only child and heir, and as an exemplary pattern of female excellence, rather than by consideration of the literary quality of her work...

AK 's death was lamented in at least three poems. Her father printed in her PoemsDryden 's ode on her death, which links her painting and poetry, and subordinates both arts to her virtue...

Dryden showed his copy of the poem to William Walsh and William Wycherley , and said all three writers agreed that Chudleigh's was the best of all the poems he had received in tribute to...

Congreve was twenty-one when on 22 December 1691 he licensed his first book, a short novel called Incognita: or, Love and Duty Reconcil'd, which was published the following year. He moved quickly into...

As to poetry, Paradise Lost was quickly recognised as a classic. In 1674, while it was still a very recent text, Dryden praised it as undoubtedly one of the greatest, most noble, and most sublime...

An amateur performance at Court of Dryden 's The Indian Emperor used a prologue which AB included in her Covent Garden Drolery, but probably did not write.

AF was a constant source of scenes, burlesques, and improvisations for performance by the Women's Liberation Street Theatre Group . She also wrote for a number of underground or radical papers: Ink, Islington Gutter...

It is difficult to summarise AB 's immense and complex importance for the history of women's writing. Virginia Woolf said she deserved from all women a tribute of flowers because she was the first to...

ET (dubbed Corinna by Dryden and writing mostly in the early eighteenth century) was a poet of real stature and an interesting letter-writer. Her few authentic works have been upstaged by the many miscellaneous writings...

AK (also a painter) was a fine Restoration-period poet, who has the misfortune of being better known for Dryden 's praises of her than for her actual work.

MLC 's occasions include the public and private. She opens with an ode on the recent death of the queen's only surviving child , in which the speaker, unconventionally, rejects the consolation duly offered by...

The volume nicely mixes the personal and political. SF shows daring in expressions of love and of refusal to accept conventional restraints of all kinds. She reprints all four of her poems on Dryden 's...

M. G. Lewis is a more complicated case, treated with some nuance. SG admires The Monk but feels that after that Lewis's real talent was obscured by the baneful influence of German fiction: she agrees...

She praised Creech's version (the first available in English) as making ancient learning available to women, whose education (according to the scanted Customs of the Nation) keeps women from reading great writers...

She notes that poets have lived difficult and unappreciated lives, and that many have been forgotten. Quoting a remark by Pope (that time, which has made Chaucer unintelligible, will one day do the same with...