Elizabeth Bentley

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Standard Name: Bentley, Elizabeth
Birth Name: Elizabeth Bentley
Used Form: E. Bentley
EB was a labouring-class poet of the later eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, who provided with her poems an account of her life designed to raise patrons. Her work was sufficiently religious and submissive in tone to go down well with her social superiors, though she lauded independence and favoured abolition of the slave trade.
Photo of an oval engraving of the young Elizabeth Bentley by a Miss Buck after T. Bassett, frontispiece of Bentley's "Genuine Poetical Compositions", 1791. She is clad in suitably plain style, wears a starched cap and neckerchief over her dress.

Connections

Connections Author name Excerpt
Literary responses Elizabeth Hands
A brief notice in the Analytical Review written (probably) by Mary Wollstonecraft early in the year after publication treated EH fairly scathingly.
Wollstonecraft, Mary. The Works of Mary Wollstonecraft. Editors Todd, Janet and Marilyn Butler, Pickering, 1989, 7 vols.
7: 203
George Ogle in the Monthly Review and Roger Gough in the...
Literary responses Mary Leapor
ML was by no means forgotten after her first discovery. She was praised in John Duncombe 's Feminiadand accorded the largest share of space in Poems by Eminent Ladies.William Cowper , who...

Timeline

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Texts

Bentley, Elizabeth. An Ode on the Glorious Victory. Stevenson and Matchett, 1805.
Bentley, Elizabeth. Genuine Poetical Compositions on Various Subjects. Crouse and Stevenson, 1791.
Bentley, Elizabeth. Miscellaneous Poems; Being the Genuine Compositions of Elizabeth Bentley, of Norwich. Matchett, Stevenson, and Matchett, 1835.
Bentley, Elizabeth. Poems; Being the Genuine Compositions of Elizabeth Bentley, of Norwich. Sold by the Author; Stevenson, Matchett, and Stevenson, 1821.
Bentley, Elizabeth. “Preface”. Genuine Poetical Compositions on Various Subjects, edited by Rev. John Walker, Crouse and Stevenson, 1791.