“Lactilla Tends her Fav’rite Cow”: Ecocritical Readings of Animals and Women in Eighteenth-Century British Labouring-Class Poetry (review)

In this short but provocative monograph, Anne Milne tends to her favourite (or at least her most rhetorically useful) poems by eighteenth-century labouring-class women that contain representations of domestic animals. The book is organized around close readings of five such poems by five poets: Mary Leapor, Mary Collier, Elizabeth Hands, Ann Yearsley, and Janet Little. With the exception of Collier’s The Woman’s Labour, Milne treats poems by these labouring-class women that have received only scant attention to date. Focusing on the connection between women and animals through the “ecofeminist notion of ‘interlocking oppressions,’” Milne’s overarching purpose is to address “issues of oppression across class, species, and gender boundaries” (129). The strengths of Milne’s work include carefully situating her ecocritical feminist perspective in relation to previous critics and employing an intertextual approach that puts her cluster of poems in dialogue with contemporary non-literary texts that shed light on period attitudes towards both the animals and the domesticating practices in question.

Milne eschews chronology as an ordering principle in favour of a discussion that “moves from ‘useful’ animals who exist within agricultural and labour contexts to ‘useless’ animals appropriated as emblems and household pets” (31). She begins, appropriately, by setting out the various processes of domestication (of animals to humans; of woman to man; of labouring-class “natural genius” poets to patrons and literary culture) that will inform subsequent chapters through her treatment of Leapor’s “Man the Monarch.” Here Milne extends previous readings of this poem, particularly Donna Landry’s, by focusing on “Leapor’s conceptualization of ‘wildness’ and ‘slavery’” as the poet engages the predominant views of domestication in the period (33). Chapter 2 begins the foray into representations of “useful” animals through an extended reading of Collier’s “industrious Bees” image at the end of The Woman’s Labour. Milne argues that viewing The Woman’s Labour as a “nature poem” allows for a consideration of its “broader implications,” though this interpretive route merely ends up supporting Landry’s “resignation” thesis (67). However, in chapter 3 Milne shows that Hands puts both the extempore form and the “mad heifer” image “to subversive use” in her reading of Hands’s curious poem, “Written, originally extempore, on seeing a Mad Heifer run through the Village where the Author Lives” (69). Chapter 4 introduces the first example of a “useless” animal: “Emma’s spotless lamb” as represented by Yearsley in her poem, “Written on a Visit,” apparently to Alexander Pope’s Twickenham estate. In this poem, according to Milne, “Yearsley enacts a strategical shift in the meaning of ‘wildness’ through a representation of the hyper-docility of a spotless lamb in order to characterize her own development as an independent poet” (31). The final chapter takes up the “talking animal syndrome” through a reading of Little’s “From Snipe, a Favourite Dog, to his Master” (110).

While Milne’s intertextual method leads to engaging and often enlightening Geertzian thick description, at times I felt the poems that serve as the focal texts for each chapter got lost in the mix. Too often the poems themselves are not allowed to breathe in her analysis of them. At the risk of reducing the issue to numbers, in the Hands chapter only six full lines of the twenty-eight-line “Mad Heifer” poem are provided, along with eleven partial lines that often amount to only a few words being chopped out (81). By comparison, fourteen full lines are given from each of two more-well-known poems by Hands. In the Yearsley chapter, though the “Emma’s spotless lamb” passage is introduced early, it is some twelve pages before we learn that “the ‘Emma’ in question remains mysterious” (101). For all the attention these individual poems receive, it remains difficult to discern how...