Rowe, Elizabeth - Jane Spencer (essay date 1986)
Jane Spencer (essay date 1986)
SOURCE: "Natural, Moral and Modest: Elizabeth Rowe," in The Rise of the Woman Novelist: From Aphra Behn to Jane Austen, Basil Blackwell, 1986, pp. 81–5.
[In the following excerpt from a study of women novelists from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries, Spencer identifies Rowe as a model of eighteenth-century female virtue.]
… The early eighteenth century found its ideals of feminine and literary virtue embodied in the life and work of Elizabeth Singer Rowe (1674–1737). A native of Somerset, she was the daughter of a Dissenting preacher, and received a pious education that laid the foundations of her religious outlook. She was writing verse by the age of 12, and by the early 1690s her poems were appearing in periodicals. Her Poems on Several Occasions was published in 1696. In 1710 she married Thomas Rowe, 13 years her junior, and went to live with him in London. His death in 1715 at the...
[The entire page is 2141 words long]
Join eNotes
Over 3,500 study guides, question and answer forums, literature criticism, reference content, and much more!
Navigate
