William Shenstone

Her mother, born Elizabeth Cartwright , was a remarkable woman. She became engaged to please her family, but her fiancé died. After this she visited London and stayed with the publisher Robert Dodsley . While...

An important friend to MWD was the poet William Shenstone , whose famous ferme ornée, the Leasowes, was only about ten miles away. She may have been a child when she met him. Though...

The earliest extant poems by MWD are carefully crafted to show her skill and her familiarity with canonical poets. Most of her exemplars are male. In Rural Happiness she echoes Anne Finch : a female...

As an epistolary novel, Concealment lacks the characteristic metanarrative of other MEMF novels, though an interesting prologue addressed to the reader from the Authoress cautions against the practice of concealment. Foster also identifies herself, in...

Among these poems, To Miss —— (March 1783) is a poem of advice which recommends Milton 's Eve as a model. It applies to dawning reason the language both of religion and Romanticism: Go seek...

The novel combines domestic humour and social satire. The courtship of Eglantine Fortescue and the young officer Augustus Fitzroy is almost overshadowed by the broad-brush picture of their families and friends. Eglantine incurs disapproval first...

In the grounds the Ladies followed William Shenstone 's concept of the ferme ornée; even their kitchen garden and orchard were beautified. The garden was approached by way of a gothic arch, where...

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

JL lived most of her first seventeen years at Kitwell House in Bartley Green, near Halesowen. Her father had bought this red-brick, Georgian house years ago as a retreat from business and the profit...

BH also pays much attention in her poems to other writers. Stanzas to the River Don footnotes Wortley Hall as a former home of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu .Ode to Apathy...

Most of SB 's poetry is hard to date. She may, however, have produced an ode to the poet and landscape gardener William Shenstone (a forecast of her later taste for the picturesque) as early...

Frances Thynne, later Hertford, began letter-writing at an early age. She was eleven when her grandfather was glad to find her in an hopeful way of being a good scribe, and twelve when her...

The circumstances of misattribution are mysterious, but literary historian Michael F. Suarez guesses that Dodsley and William Shenstone deliberately printed this poem as Montagu 's in order to preserve the reputation of the real author...

She left the stock, the house, and several keepsakes to her sister, to her nephew Alfred William both her inkstand and her copy of John Hawkesworth 's translation of Fénelon 's Télémaque (apparently recognizing William...