Eighteenth-Century Women Poets and Their Poetry: Inventing Agency, Inventing Genre

Contents

Contents Acknowledgments ix Abbreviations xi Plan of the Book xiii Approaching the Poetry xix The Chapters xxii 1 Introduction 1 Changing Contexts 2 Systems, Gender, and Persistent Issues 14 Agency and the ‘‘Marked Marker’’ 22 2 Anne Finch and What Women Wrote 28 The Social and the Formal 29 Anne Finch and Popular Poetry 39 Poetry on Poetry 58 The Spleen as Legacy 72 3 Women and Poetry in the Public Eye 80 Poetry as News and Critique 84 The Woman Question 99 Elizabeth Singer Rowe 113 4 Hymns, Narratives, and Innovations in Religious Poetry 123 The Voice of Paraphrase 126 The Hymn as Personal Lyric 137 Religious Poetry as Subversive Narrative 152 Devout Soliloquies 168 viii Contents 5 Friendship Poems 175 The Legacy of Katherine Philips 177 Encouragement and the Counteruniverse 193 Jane Brereton 217 Adaptation and Ideology 223 6 Retirement Poetry 233 Beyond Convention 234 Memory, Time, and Elizabeth Carter 241 Reflection and Difference 257 7 The Elegy 268 What Did Women Write? 271 Representative Composers: Darwall and Seward 286 The Elegy and Same-Sex Desire 296 Entertainment and Forgetting 312 8 The Sonnet, Charlotte Smith, and What Women Wrote 316 The Sonnet and the Political 317 Sonnet Sequences 325 Women Poets and the Spread of the Sonnet 338 The Emigrants, Conversations, and Beachy Head 351 Smith as Transitional Poet 366 9 Conclusion 376 Biographies of the Poets 403 Notes 413 Bibliography 467 Index 499 ...