Jonathan Swift

MB 's campaign to raise subscribers for her Poems on Several Occasions was well under way: Swift wrote to her about its progress on 23 February 1731.

The title-page said 1686. The frontispiece is an engraving from one of AK 's two painted self-portraits. Jonathan Swift had a copy in his library. During the twenty-first century, copies of this handsome little book...

The Morning Post published MR 's London's Summer Morning, a word-painting of city life in the tradition of Swift 's Description poems.

Love in Excess, with its arguably six editions by 1725, has repeatedly been likened to Daniel DefoeRobinson Crusoe and Jonathan SwiftGulliver's Travels as bestselling English fictions before Pamela. It has never shared their status, partly...

LP 's work was included in Poems by Eminent Ladies, 1755. But it was also traduced in catchpenny publications like The Celebrated Mrs. Pilkington's Jests; or, The Cabinet of Wit and Humour, 1759...

Today DM 's stock is high, but she is less studied than many of her contemporaries. Her choice of genres and her close involvement with the political and other affairs of her time make her...

This poem was considered one of CC 's best works. It was praised by Mary Russell Mitford , and George Saintsbury noted its originality (though the passage on the dead wit and writer searching...

These poems succeed in making the Christian life of resignation and unselfishness into a series of heroic trials and combats. MA has the makings of a fine poet in the grand style; she evidently learned...

Against the trend of the times, RS aimed for historical interest rather than literary canonicity, compiling in his Specimens of the Later English Poets a collection of representative voices rather than a garland: The taste...

Her first poem, an Introductory Address to the Muse, uses the language of love and courtship: In secret shades alone I woo'd thee then / By stealth, nor to the world durst tell my love...

Along with the sentimental and misunderstanding-prone lovers and the ridiculous esprit circle (which might so easily be taken to represent the Bluestockings), The Witlings features a women's working environment: a milliner's shop where seamstresses make...

Her topics here, all relevant to the escalating American demands for independence, are the declining economy, rising prices, and an oppressive burden of taxes. She was entering a debate previously carried on among such...

She explains that having waited four months for Swift to answer her marriage proposal—still in love with him, having rejected other suitors for his sake, admiring his power of raillery, forgiving his harshness to women...

She had rich material to draw from because her father, John Sinclair (1754-1835), was an unusually accomplished man who was very active in public life. Most notably, he conceived and undertook the publication of The...

The Elixir of Life opens with the waking vision of a man and woman in their summer prime, he looking like Apollo, she looking like an angel with just a touch of the siren or...