[In the following essay, Thomas demonstrates how a variety of eighteenth-century women responded to Pope's poetry in terms of cultural issues surrounding their ability to create literary art, focusing on the significance of the natural settings of Twickenham as a symbol of literary creativity for both Pope and his female audience.]

Alexander Pope's rhetorical constructions of femininity have stimulated recent critical debate. Such studies as Laura Brown's Marxist Alexander Pope (1985) and Ellen Pollak's feminist The Poetics of Sexual Myth: Gender and Ideology in the Verse of Swift and Pope (1985) have analyzed Pope's poems from specific, late twentieth-century points of view.¹ Their perspectives emphasize Pope's role as a spokesperson for his culture, both writers arraigning him for opinions less defensible today than 250 years ago. Pope appears a straightforward misogynist in both studies: according to Brown, he trivialized and commodified women; in Pollak's account, he insulted and oppressed them.

Brown's and Pollak's books have inspired provocative rereadings of Pope and his contemporaries. Ruth Salvaggio's Enlightened Absence (1988), for example, has applied French feminist theory to works by Newton, Swift, Pope, and Anne Finch, although Salvaggio regards the male poets with more pity than anger.² All three studies raise questions about the sufficiency of modern insight to elucidate eighteenth-century texts. If Pope was a brutal misogynist, why did contemporary enemies dismiss him as a women's toy, and his writings as a ladies' pastime? If Pope deemed women inconsequential, why did he bother to cultivate a female audience? Why did he sympathize with women's limitations in such poems as “Epistle to Miss Blount, with the Works of Voiture” (1712)? And how did eighteenth-century women readers receive his writings? These questions demand a more extensive and accurate context than current opinions provide.

The women who read and responded to Pope's writings formed a prominent aspect of that context. In “Engendering the Reader: ‘Wit and Poetry and Pope’ Once More” (1988), Penelope Wilson has advocated a reader-response approach to the sexual politics of Pope's rhetoric. Complaining that few contemporary women readers' responses to Pope survive, Wilson nevertheless argues that the most fruitful area for feminist studies of eighteenth-century writings examines images of the woman reader.³ Wilson observes that applications of current theory to Pope's poetry risk anachronism. She claims, however, that without a significant sample of women's responses, reader-response criticism will remain confined to studies of textual images and gendered rhetoric. More recent studies have moved beyond this impasse. Valerie Rumbold's Women's Place in Pope's World (1989) has studied Pope's relationships with women, observing their responses while filling some of the lacunae in Maynard Mack's Alexander Pope: A Life (1986).⁴ Several inconsistencies in Pope's attitude toward women become coherent in Rumbold's context. His frequent blend of sympathy and disdain, for example, grew from volatile relationships with particular women rather than from philosophical dismission of womankind. Donna Landry's The Muses of Resistance: Laboring-Class Women's Poetry in Britain, 1739-1796 (1990) includes a Marxist analysis of Pope's significance to laboring-class women poets.⁵ Rumbold's and Landry's books demonstrate that, as Wilson predicted, contemporary women's responses uniquely illuminate Pope's writings, but also that, contrary to Wilson's fears, those responses are eminently recoverable.

A surprising amount of testimony survives to illustrate the ways eighteenth-century women read Pope. The poet courted their responses: contemporaries identified Pope's work with the growing audience of female readers, and Pope sometimes chose genres conventionally associated with women, such as the heroic epistle. Women referred to, quoted, and commented on Pope's poems and letters in diaries, letters, travel books, translations, essays, and novels. Women addressed poems commendatory or critical to Pope and designed companion pieces to his poems. Women poets learned their craft by studying English poets, especially Pope. Their poems refract his themes, language, and imagery through feminine experience and opinion. Pope's women readers, moreover, ranged from laborers to aristocrats, encompassing responses influenced not only by gender but by social and economic status.

These responses should prove crucial to feminist analyses of Pope's writings. They confirm the extent to which Pope's poems and prose merely reiterated feminine stereotypes or expanded the contemporary horizon of expectations. They determine whether women received Pope's work passively or resisted its constructions of femininity. Women's responses reveal which aspects of or possibilities latent in Pope's work caught their attention—sometimes unpredictable from a late twentieth-century point of view. Contemporary women's responses clarify both Pope's work and its relation to cultural history. Equally important, they advance feminist criticism and women's literary history and help to reconstruct the female experience and perception of eighteenth-century culture. As I hope to demonstrate throughout Alexander Pope and His Eighteenth-Century Women Readers, a response to Pope was, for many women, a response to cultural issues ranging from women's emotional and intellectual qualities to their creative capacity.

INTRUDERS IN THE GARDEN: EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY WOMEN AND LITERARY CREATIVITY

Pope, at least in his youth, associated romantic or sexual feelings for women with creativity, and both with natural settings. His poignant “Hymn Written in Windsor Forest” (1717) bids farewell to both his home and the romantic aspirations of his youth.⁶ Pope commemorates Windsor's woods as the “Scene of my youthful Loves” (2), then as the scene of his dedication to poetry after realizing that he might “love the brightest eyes, but love in vain!” (8). Henceforth, the energy other men might direct toward business, political preferment, or love would be lavished on his muse, a creative spirit emanating in this hymn from the natural world that inspired his earliest published poems.

Five years later, having completed his initial landscaping at Twickenham, he confided in “Epistle to Mr. [John] Gay” his identification of the garden with romantic or sexual longing.

Joy lives not here; to happier seats it flies,
And only dwells where Wortley casts
her eyes.
What are the gay parterre, the chequer'd shade,
The morning bower, the ev'ning colonade,
But soft recesses of uneasy minds,
To sigh unheard in, to the passing winds?

(5-10)

Hopelessly attached to Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Pope claimed to have created a bower in which “to die” like a wounded deer, “the arrow at his heart” (12). But literally, he had created a retreat in which to craft poems expressing his emotions. As Pope aged, his emotions were most often stimulated by friendships, ethics, and politics, rather than by romantic love. But his garden and grotto remained the site of creative inspiration, haunt of the same muses who pressed his hand in Windsor Forest “and said, Be Ours!” (“Hymn,” 4).⁷

This relationship between Pope and his natural surroundings was understood by generations of Pope's readers, who denoted sparkling stones to pave his grotto during the poet's life, and who made so many pilgrimages to Twickenham after his death that Baroness Sophia Howe, its weary proprietor, tore down the villa and defaced the grotto and garden in 1807.⁸ What Mack has called “a Pope-and-Twickenham legend” evoked such poetic tributes as Robert Dodsley's to “the solemn Place, / From whence [Pope's] Genius soar'd to Nature's God” (Garden, 266-67). Women readers, too, identified Pope's garden with his genius, as well as with their own relation to creativity.

But women's responses to Pope's garden were necessarily more complicated than, for example, that of the Frenchman who identified with Pope (“Comme toi, je chéris ma noble indépendance”) and invoked him as muse “dans ces bosquets par ta muse habités.”⁹ Twickenham enshrined the association between “husbanding” a landscape and “fathering” verse, recognized at some level by Pope himself in his Windsor “Hymn” and “Epistle to Mr. Gay.” Pope cultivated the image of Horatian philosopher, determined to write poems that “pleas'd by manly ways” (“Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot,” 337). While women admired Pope's writings as avidly, their identification with the poet was never as straightforward as men's. Their relation to Twickenham as a symbol of creativity likewise required considerable adjustment. Pope's home represented not just a particular poet's achievement but a gendered conception of genius that discouraged female emulation. It is not surprising, therefore, that of responses written by two prominent women during Pope's lifetime, one was inimical; the other, covertly ambitious.

Lady Mary Wortley Montagu was simultaneously complimented and embarrassed by Pope's tribute in “Epistle to Mr. Gay.” She sent a copy of the verses to her sister in Paris, but she explained she had “stiffle'd them” in England, and she requested that Lady Mar do the same. Lady Mary characteristically felt the impropriety as much as the flattery of Pope's admiration. She informed Lady Mar that Pope, whom she saw “very seldom,” had “made a subterrenean Grotto, which he has furnish'd with Looking Glass, and they tell me it has a very good Effect.” Twickenham gossip contradicted Lady Mary, reporting that the pair were very close.¹⁰ If so, Lady Mary was probably among the first visitors to the new grotto.

Pope and Lady Mary quarreled, however, not long after he composed “Epistle to Mr. Gay.” In 1728, he ridiculed her in the Dunciad as the bane of a “hapless Monsieur … at Paris” (2.127). Pope referred to Lady Mary's unfortunate management of Nicolas-François Rémond's South Sea investment, but in the Dunciad's context his remark suggests sexual misconduct. Lady Mary retaliated for this assault on her reputation by attacking Pope's poetic reputation. “Her Palace placed beneath a muddy road” (1729) installs Pope as crown prince of dullness.¹¹ The poem opens with a startling description of the very “subterrenean grotto” Lady Mary had praised to her sister seven years before.

Lady Mary mocks Pope's selection of a cave for creative meditation, recalling instead his vivid evocations of the caves of Spleen (The Rape of the Lock) and Dulness (Dunciad). In her poem, Pope's grotto exercises a gravitational pull downward, impeding packhorses on the road above. Lady Mary subverts Pope's architectural metaphors.

Here chose the Goddess her belov'd Retreat
Which Phoebus trys in vain to penetrate,
Adorn'd within by Shells of small expense
(Emblems of tinsel Rhime, and triffleing Sense),
Perpetual fogs enclose the sacred Cave,
The neighboring Sinks their fragrant Odours gave.

(4-9)

Lady Mary replaces an ancient tradition, the cave as site of prophetic vision, with her own observation that the god of poetry cannot penetrate its walls. Pope paved his grotto with shells, mirrors, and sparkling minerals, a glittering ambience for meditation. While Pope evidently associated the spars and shells with poetic inspiration, they seemed cheap “Emblems of tinsel Rhyme” to his adversary.

Lady Mary finally condemns the grotto's unhealthy proximity to the river, not to mention local cesspools. Her description suggests Pope's affinity with the filthy antics of his dunces in book 2 of the Dunciad, in which Dulness inspires Curll with “ordure's sympathetic force” (95) but then awards him a mere phantom poet for winning the booksellers' race. Dulness consoles Curll, however, by suggesting he mislead the public with a similar ploy, attributing scurrilous publications to distinguished authors just as a bawd dubs her prostitutes “Duchesses and Lady Mary's” (Dunciad, 2.128). Lady Mary's response implies that a correspondingly literal association with excrement inspired Pope's slander. But Pope's grotto was not endangered by cess-pools, though a damp cave was hardly the ideal environment for a frail man. Pope thought less of this inconvenience than of the grotto's associations with wisdom and philosophical simplicity. Lady Mary's satire ignores these ideas, rejecting not only Pope's claim to poetic inspiration but the poet himself. In his poem to Gay, Pope had implicitly dedicated his landscape projects—including the new grotto—to Lady Mary. “Her Palace placed beneath a muddy road” emphatically repudiates that gesture, denying Pope's worthiness as a lover, as a poet, and even as a landscape architect.

Elizabeth Carter enjoyed a happier venture into Pope's garden in July 1738. The poet was not at home when her party visited, but his servant John Serle permitted them to view Pope's grounds. Carter was impressed enough to write her father that “of all the Things I have yet seen of this sort none ever suited my own Fancy so well.”¹² Like most tourists, Carter desired a souvenir: she evidently plucked a sprig of laurel as an appropriate token of her visit to the poet's garden. However she intended the gesture, Samuel Johnson detected its professional significance. He published a Latin epigram on the incident in July's Gentleman's Magazine, declaring that “dulcis Elisa” had no need to steal the laurel; “Si neget Popus, Apollo dabit.”¹³ Pope, of course, had not denied Carter the laurel; she undoubtedly “stole” the sprig because her host was not present to grant her request. But several Gentleman's Magazine contributors were charmed by the young woman's “theft”; the August Gentleman's Magazine contained three translations of Johnson's epigram.¹⁴ Each contributor's epigram suggested “Eliza's” longing for the laurel wreath of poetic fame and the injustice were Pope to refuse this deserving female aspirant. As Johnson expressed it in his translation, “Were Pope once void of wonted candour found, / Just Phoebus would devote his plant to thee” (7-8).

These gallant epigrams probably display the writers' wit and prowess in translating Latin (Stephen Duck, the “thresher poet,” was one contributor) as much as the writers' admiration of Elizabeth Carter's poetry. Carter had just published her first volume of poems that month. Her contributions to Gentleman's Magazine had been enthusiastically received, but she had not courted the role of Pope's female rival. The three men's epigrams in the August Gentleman's Magazine nevertheless develop the image of Carter as an ambitious interloper in Pope's garden. “Alexis” imagines her “rapt with eager hand … snatch[ing] the bay” (3). In Duck's version, “Desirous of the laurel bough, / She crops it to adorn her brow” (3-4). Carter's gesture thus appears an aggressive assertion of her poetic achievement. All three epigrams also cast Pope as the jealous guardian of Parnassus by speculating whether he might refuse “a wreath so due” (“Alexis,” 4). The image suggests that Pope is aware of and threatened by Carter—an idea that might have occurred to Johnson because he knew she was translating Crousaz's hostile Examen of the Essay on Man. The epigrams bear little relation to Carter's personality or her actual visit to Twickenham, but they record a contemporary impression of Carter's gifts. Her literary career was barely established, but at least three literate men considered her a potential feminine rival to masculine poetic hegemony. Although constrained to trespass in Pope's domain, she deserved to share his laurel wreath.

Sharing the page with these tributes, Carter answered Johnson's epigram in both Latin and English. The responses disclaim false modesty, acknowledging both her literacy and her wit. But she abjures any pretense to rival Pope.

In vain Eliza's daring
hand
Usurp'd the laurel bough;
Remov'd from Pope's, the
wreath must fade
On ev'ry meaner brow.

(1-4)

Rather than contradict her male admirers' account of the visit, she chastizes herself for usurping Pope's laurel. Carter gracefully accepts their compliment, but she defuses any potential offense to the Wasp of Twickenham. Perhaps, worried that her translation of Crousaz might anger Pope when published, she wished to avoid prior offense. Carter entertained ambivalent feelings about Pope's verse. By accepting Johnson's conceit, she acknowledges her literary ambition. She even describes herself grabbing the laurel wreath from Pope's head. But the theft is foolish and ineffectual; Carter simultaneously owns her ambition and denies her ability to achieve it. Concerned to appear modest as well as accomplished, Carter was not what modern feminists call a “voleuse de langue”—a woman who steals, then flees with, masculine language.¹⁵ Although the garden that reflected Pope's imagination suited her fancy, she makes no move to appropriate his property, either the laurel or the claim to poetic excellence it represents. Instead, Carter describes her visit to Twickenham as a bungled theft, a doomed attempt to transplant Pope's laurels “to climates not their own” (6). A child not of Phoebus but of “a paler sun” (8), she cannot sustain the wreath. Carter's response epitomizes what proved to be her fitful career. Torn between awareness of her gifts and a nearly insurmountable shyness about pursuing literary projects, she never seriously competed for literary fame. The Gentleman's Magazine epigrams suggest both her youthful aspirations and the fear that prevented her outright quest. Carter fancied Pope's garden, but she contented herself with a surreptitious visit.

Elizabeth Carter's defence, like Lady Mary's repudiation, regarded a living contemporary. Lady Mary confined her poem to manuscript, emphasizing the personal nature of her grievance with Pope. Her retaliation against his boasted grotto intends a reciprocal wound. Carter's epigrams defer to a poet feared for installing critics and would-be competitors in successive editions of the Dunciad.¹⁶ When she criticized Pope's poems, she did so subtly.

Women writing after Pope's death more freely described the garden's personal significance, identifying it with their personalities and aspirations. When Jael Henrietta Pye published A short account, of the principal seats and gardens, in and about Twickenham in 1760, she prefaced her little guide with an apologetic introduction.

These little Excursions being commonly the only Travels permitted to our Sex, & the only Way we have of becoming at all acquainted with the Progress of Arts, I thought it might not be improper, to throw together on Paper, such Remarks as occured to me, never intending they should appear: but the Partiality of some of my Friends have call'd them to Light.¹⁷

She concludes by soliciting constructive criticism, but she adds “that it is my Ambition, to appear to [my readers], in every agreeable Light but that of an Author” (xi-xii).

When Pye approaches Pope's garden, now owned by Sir William Stanhope, the sole object of her description is the poet's obelisk commemorating his mother.

This is a Circumstance of more Credit to him, than all his Works; for the Beauties of Poetry are tasted only by a few, but the Language of the Heart is understood by all.

Nor does the Author of the Essay on Man, surrounded by the Muses, and invoking his St. John, appear half so amiable, as the pious Son, lamenting over the Remains of his aged Parent.

(18-19)

Pye evidently found in Pope's garden a kindred spirit, more disposed to appear a man of sentiment than an author. After confessing her ignorance and limited experience, Pye rejoices that Pope's most remarkable garden ornament appealed not to the privileged few—aristocratic men, such as Bolingbroke—but to the many. Pope's reverential gesture appealed to this young lady, who found his filial devotion more accessible than his poetic ethical system.

Pye's younger but more distinguished contemporary Hannah More recorded her response to Pope's garden in greater detail. More's letter to Mrs. Gwatkin is undated, but her visit must have taken place between Sir William Stanhope's additions to Pope's house (ca. 1760) and his death in 1772.¹⁸ The visit thus predated More's first publication (The Search After Happiness, 1773) and her first visit to London. More declares that although she could not attend the recent birthnight in town, her loss has been more than compensated: “I have visited the mansion of the tuneful Alexander.” Although More later became skeptical of Pope's verse, this early letter all but deifies the poet: “I have rambled through the immortal shades of Twickenham; I have trodden the haunts of the swan of Thames.” Having announced her adventure, however, More descends abruptly into reality.

You know, my dear madam, what an enthusiastic ardour I have ever had to see this almost sacred spot, and how many times have I created to myself an imaginary Thames: but, enthusiasm apart, there is very little merit either in the grotto, house, or gardens, but that they once belonged to one of the greatest poets on earth.

(Roberts, 1:34)

In a critical manner prophetic of her later prose, More explains that Pope's house must have been “very small” before Sir William added two wings. Sir William's decor, however, is “only genteel,” and his library “contemptibly small.” More's dream of Pope's immortal haunts confronts mundane reality: “The grotto is very large, very little ornamented, with but little spar or glittering stones” (1:35).

More finds Twickenham's failure to match her expectations disconcerting. Her long-awaited view of the Thames was foiled; its “noble current was frozen quite over.” But she produces a compensatory myth. The Thames' frozen condition explains” why we saw no naiads. Every Hamadryad was also congealed in its parent tree.” Soothed by this fiction, More confesses, “I could not be honest for the life of me: from the grotto I stole two bits of stones, from the garden a sprig of laurel, and from one of the bed-chambers a pen” (1:35). The filched souvenirs jar with More's reputation for scrupulous honesty. In 1785, for example, she was outraged when Ann Yearsley accused her of withholding subscription money. But More was no different from Elizabeth Carter or any tourist coveting a token remembrance; that Pope's grotto seemed “very little ornamented” fewer than thirty years after his death suggests hundreds of previous depredations.¹⁹

More's stolen souvenirs are less revealing than her letter's ambivalence. She recalls her anticipatory rapture as an established attitude (“You know … what an … ardor I have ever had to see this … spot”), taxed by her encounter with the small, plainly furnished house and somber grotto. By imagining the temporary flight of resident naiads and hamadryads, More preserves a cherished ideal. Only Pope's Pastorals feature naiads, although More may also have recalled the nymph Lodona in “Windsor Forest,” or the sylphs in The Rape of the Lock. More's fable suggests that she, like many eighteenth-century women, preferred Pope's early, less controversial poetry. Or she may have wished simply to reinstate a literary ambience in the frozen landscape. But by inventing a fanciful explanation for Twickenham's uninspiring reality, More maintains her youthful rapture. Her selection of relics—the laurel, the pen, the stones from Pope's grotto—seeks communion with the poet by removing bits of his “haunts” for personal meditation. Away from the house and grotto, More can satisfactorily reconstruct their “immortal shades.” This impulse contrasts significantly with More's later attitude. As a mature writer, More could no longer reconcile her delight in “tuneful Alexander” with what she considered dangerous about his verse. This early visit anticipates her eventual disillusionment, but it also suggests why More later warned young readers against Pope's poetry: as a young woman, Hannah More had overlooked reality for the sake of Pope's aesthetic pleasures.

Lady Mary dismissed Pope's “Shells of small expence,” while Elizabeth Carter and Hannah More—typical middle-class tourists—coveted souvenirs. More's laboring-class nemesis, Ann Yearsley, responded quite differently to Twickenham in “Written on a Visit,” from her second volume (1787).²⁰ Yearsley's poem expresses no proprietary relation to the poet's garden. She rather distinguishes between Pope's verse, written solely to please his muse, and her own, sponsored by patrons. Yearsley does not approach the garden with impunity as an invited guest or even as a member of a touring party, but as a self-conscious “rustic” unsure of her welcome.

Delightful Twick'nham! may a rustic hail
          Thy leafy shades, where Pope in rapture stray'd,
Clasp young-ey'd Ecstasy amid the vale,
          And soar, full-pinion'd, with the buoyant maid?
Ah! no, I droop! her fav'rite Bard she mourns;
          Yet Twick'nham, shall thy groves assist my song;
For while, with grateful love my bosom burns,
          Soft Zephyr bears the artless strain along.

(1-8)

Yearsley's late-century apotheosis contrasts poignantly with Pope's account of the “kind Muses” who met him as he “stray'd” in Windsor Forest. Those had “gently press'd [his] hand, and said, Be Ours” (“Hymn,” 4), a chaste simulacrum of the marriage or love affair he might long for but would always be denied. Pope's somber version of his union with the muse acknowledges the severe limitations imposed by his body and his adherence to Catholicism. Yearsley, writing forty-three years after his death, imagines only the poet's blissful freedom to stray untrammelled over his own property, accompanied by a muse more like a concubine than the wife-substitute of Pope's “Hymn.” Where Pope had forsaken dreams of power, property, and romantic love for poetry, Yearsley imagines him ravished by unlimited creative power, clasping his ecstatic muse and soaring above the landscape.

Yearsley's glance strains upward in her first stanza, hoping to glimpse the soaring bard. Her second “droops” back, first into Twickenham's reality: Pope died long ago, and the leafy shades now mourn rather than inspire their favorite poet. Yearsley also subsides into her own predicament. She must not aspire to Pope's unlimited heights but must write “with grateful love” in strains blown horizontally by breezes, toward her patrons, rather than upward over Twickenham's groves. The rest of the 52-line poem develops Yearsley's situation. She is evidently the guest of a wealthy couple, Maro and Emma, names redolent of his classical learning and her leisured sensibility. Emma's pet lamb, spared from preying dogs or human slaughter (lines 9-16), represents their pastoral existence. Yearsley imagines both Maro and Emma weeping over the lamb's eventual death, “Nor will the pang Lactilla's bosom spare” (20). A kind of private laureate, Yearsley will celebrate the pair's exquisite sensibilities. Dismissing her premonition of the lamb's tragic death, however, Yearsley concentrates on the friendship she feels privileged to share and inspired to sing (lines 21-32). Unlike Pope's, who clasped his muse and soared upward at will, Yearsley's poetic flight is monitored by her learned patron, Maro. Maro graciously encourages her untaught “native Genius” (32).

See, Maro points the vast, the spacious way,
          Where strong Idea may on Rapture spring:
I mount!—Wild Ardour shall ungovern'd stray;
          Nor dare the mimic pedant clip my wing.

(33-36)

Maro permits Yearsley to “stray,” like her imagined Pope, into the poetic sky. That acquired permission, however, distinguishes Yearsley from her Twickenham predecessor. Her defiance of pedants, moreover, reminds readers of her deficient education. When Yearsley cries, “Rule! what art thou? Thy limits I disown!” (37), hers is not the sentiment of Pope, who blasted such critics secure in his mastery of “those Rules of old discover'd, not devis'd” (“Essay on Criticism,” 89), the rules of classical Greece and Rome. Yearsley's is the defiance of a self-taught milkwoman, sanctioned by her patron's indulgence.

Maro invites Yearsley to soar, just as a conscientious host might invite his guest to ride. She soars on not “full-pinion'd” but borrowed wings. Yearsley concludes by assuring readers that, while she may not know the classical rules of composition, her verse is nevertheless guided by ethical precepts (line 45). Lest anyone misconstrue her delight in creativity, she pledges that “when soft'ning pleasure would invade my breast; / To [precept] my struggling spirit shall resign” (46-47). This promise, again, differentiates Yearsley from Pope. While the genteel male poet achieved fame by “clasp[ing] young-ey'd Ecstasy amid the vale,” the laboring-class female must maintain her reputation by sinking to rest “on [precept's] cold bosom” (48). While no pedant may clip her wings, Yearsley's prudent wish not to offend readers effectually checks her creative flight. She finally bids farewell to Twickenham's groves, enjoining local maidens who stroll there to “reflect how soon / Lactilla saw, and sighing left the scene” (51-52). Not for Yearsley are either Lady Mary's scorn or Carter's and More's acquisitive impulse. After reflecting on the relation between her career and Pope's, Yearsley relinquishes the scene that inspired her comparison. Her poem abjures furtive ambition like Carter's or imaginative escape like More's, for frank acknowledgment that a milkwoman-poet has no business in Pope's garden.

Anna Seward, writing to Mrs. Childers in 1804, completes the spectrum of women's responses to Pope's garden and its creative associations.²¹ Seward had been reading a five-volume edition of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu's letters, and she had confessed her irritation with Lady Mary's avowed contempt for Pope. Seward assures Mrs. Childers that Pope's anger with Lady Mary was justified, “since, in the zenith of his admiration, it reached his ear, that she had lyingly called him ‘the thing of sound without sense.’ Where was her own sense so to call the more than Horace of his time?” (Letters, 6:146). Seward finds particularly exasperating Lady Mary's description of Pope's grotto “in her pointless satire, the Court of Dulness” (6:149). Seward persistently defended the literary glories of Queen Anne's reign, often to preface her claim that England currently boasted even greater poetic riches. Lady Mary's dismissal of a site frequented by “all the brightness of the famous poetic galaxy” thus affronted both Seward's critical judgment and, by extension, her stature as heir to the Augustan poets.

But Lady Mary's cynicism most distresses Seward. “With what different ideas did I, in my youthful years, meditate the same scene,” Seward cries. She produces, as illustration, a sonnet “On Reading A Description of Pope's Gardens at Twickenham.” She claims she wrote the poem in her “youthful years,” although undoubtedly she revised it to convey her mature perspective.²²

Ah! might I range each hallow'd bower and glade
          Museus cultur'd, many a raptur'd sigh
          Would that dear local consciousness supply
          Beneath his willow, in his grotto's shade,
Whose roof his hand with ores and shells inlaid!
          How sweet to watch, with reverential eye,
          Through the sparr'd arch, the streams he oft
survey'd,
          Thine, blue Thamesis, gently wandering by?
This is the poet's triumph, and it towers
          O'er life's pale ills, his consciousness
of powers
          That lift his memory from oblivion's gloom;
Secure a train of these recording hours,
          By his idea deck'd with tender bloom,
          For spirits rightly touch'd, through ages yet
to come.

Lady Mary's spirit, by contrast, was not “rightly touched”; her inability to appreciate Pope's grotto seems comparatively corrupt. “These innocent and delightful enthusiasms are real blessings to the mind in which they spring,” comments Seward (Letters, 6:149). But the sonnet records more than Seward's championship of her predecessor against his (in her estimate) mean-spirited adversary. It also reveals Seward's competitive estimate of Pope's gifts, her almost literal longing to stand in his creative shoes.

Ann Yearsley gazed skyward toward the soaring poet, only to murmur “Ah, no.” Her sigh acknowledged the ineradicable distance between herself and Pope. Anna Seward's octave recreates Twickenham from Pope's personal vantage. She imagines roaming from bower to willow to grotto, sighing because Pope himself stood in these precise spots and enjoyed the same view of the Thames. Seward's “local consciousness” impresses her not with Pope's absence or superiority but with the delightful prospect of becoming Pope, or at least sharing his perspective, while she surveys his domain.

The sonnet's concluding sestet is more ambiguous. “This is the poet's triumph” ostensibly refers to the consoling thoughts Pope enjoyed while contemplating the Thames from his grotto. Secure in his immortal gifts, Pope knew that “spirits rightly touch'd, through ages yet to come” would revere his memory. Seward's demonstrative “this,” however, also refers back to the particular experience described in her octave: Anna Seward's imaginary visit to Pope's garden. “The poet's triumph,” in this reading, is his reincarnation in Seward's consciousness. Anna Seward materializes in Pope's garden as his heir, destined not only to defend his reputation but, as his creative disciple, to extend Pope's triumph. Such a reading of this sonnet seems strained only outside the context of Seward's lifelong relation to Pope. Throughout her career, she quarreled with, analyzed, defended, appropriated, and revised Pope's poems. With “On Reading a Description of Pope's Gardens,” she may intend only a lyrical tribute to his enduring appeal. The ambiguous syntax of her sonnet's central turn, however, undermines Seward's purpose. By assimilating Pope's “local consciousness” to the favored poetic form of her mature career, Seward suggests the magnitude of her aspiration.

This brief survey indicates the complexity of eighteenth-century women's responses to Alexander Pope. Pope and his garden represented the relation between artist and creative power, a vexed issue for contemporary women. They were uncertain, at first, of their right to “attempt the pen.”²³ But later, emerging cautiously into the literary marketplace, eighteenth-century women probed Twickenham's metaphorical implications. Their assessments suggest the range of possible female responses to Pope, by readers variously educated and of different social and economic status. Individual gifts and temperaments, changing literary tastes, and women's growing share in the literary market throughout the century preclude a static definition of Pope's relation to his eighteenth-century women readers. Women's responses to Pope's garden also belie any conclusion that women passively received Pope's gender ideology. Carter's and Yearsley's wistful poems, for example, announce but finally cancel feminine ambitions. Both poems, while conciliatory, indicate painful awareness that cultural demands for feminine submission and propriety exacerbate masculine poetic hegemony. That Carter and Yearsley accede does not prove that they sanctioned these constraints. Their poems intimate resistance as well as submission. That Pope and his garden represent a locus of struggle to all these writers does not prove he was women's oppressor. Pope often figures in women's writings because he appears, as to Lady Mary, vulnerable; as to More, pleasurable; and as to Seward, an eligible predecessor.

Women's responses also do not indicate—as Joseph Wittreich has concluded of Milton—that Pope was really a feminist.²⁴ Rather, Pope's attitude toward women tempered complex experience with reductive contemporary ideas. We may gauge, from the result, one important boundary of Pope's creative imagination. Pope also struggled, in his Iliad translation, to fulfill the role of scholarly classical translator, while assimilating women into a traditionally male audience. To the modern reader, Pope's notes directed toward women segregate and stigmatize his female readers. To contemporaries, the same notes encouraged women's unprecedented familiarity with Homer. His critics attempted to sabotage Pope's literary reputation by branding him a ladies' poet. But women rewarded Pope's gesture by cherishing his Iliad throughout the century. Many also developed a rather proprietary attitude toward his canon, scrutinizing Pope's constructions of femininity with proportionate interest. Their responses encompassed many issues besides gender, ranging from Pope's possible function as mentor, to his ethical and political philosophies. Women refused to abide by Pope's definition of their interests in the Iliad, although some modern scholars assume that Pope's significance, for eighteenth-century women readers, inhered in his constructions of gender. By forgetting the range and perspicuity of contemporary women's responses, we have not only abridged the rich history of Pope's critical reception but unwittingly abetted his representations of a shallow, passive femininity.

Pope's eighteenth-century women readers, their opinions finally enriching critical discussion, have long been shadowy figures. Although information about them is increasingly available,²⁵ their group portrait remains unsketched. Or perhaps a portrait of Pope's typical woman reader exists but its significance has gone unrecognized. While fanciful, such an identification would solve the mystery of Pope's most enigmatic portrait, painted by Charles Jervas while Pope was translating the Iliad (see frontispiece). In this portrait, Pope sits in an armchair wearing a blue-gray suit, pensively daydreaming beneath a bust of Homer. Behind the poet's chair, a shoeless young woman in a dark gold satin dress stretches on tiptoe, grasping a large book in her left hand while, with her right, pulling aside the heavy green drapery that obstructs a high shelf.²⁶ As Mack has observed, the woman resembles neither Blount sister (Pope, 343), although the painting was traditionally said to represent Pope and Martha Blount (Wimsatt, 21). If Jervas intended her as an allegorical figure, a representation of Pope's muse or even of life's distractions, her purpose remains obscure (Mack, Pope, 343).

Whatever her original function in the painting, this young woman suggests several characteristics of Pope's eighteenth-century women readers. Her shoelessness and her glance over her shoulder toward Pope and the viewer intimate deference; she evidently wishes to avoid disturbing the poet from his reverie. These characteristics may also indicate stealth, in a literal rendering of women's circumstances. Women often read poetry in snatches during precious leisure hours, sometimes despite parents' or husbands' disapproval. The painting's figure, moreover, must stretch while pushing aside a heavy curtain to reach the book, most likely a volume of Pope's Homer. Although Pope encouraged women to read his Homer, many cultural obstacles impeded women's familiarity with classical literature. Richard Steele and Joseph Addison, for example, reiterated women's domestic priorities and intellectual deficiency throughout their periodicals. Although the Tatler and Spectator condemned educational programs that refined women's bodies while neglecting their minds, reading was clearly reserved for rare intervals of leisure between household chores.²⁷ Perhaps this young woman fears that, just as she grasps her prize, a stern parent or tutor—or even Pope—will interrupt and demand that she complete her needlework before indulging in Homeric reading.

The postures and expressions of the two figures also delineate the distinct attitudes of contemporary men and women toward literature. The poet sits at ease, oblivious to the young women as he dreams of Homer. Although Pope appears tiny in proportion to his chair, the viewer focuses on him instantly not only because of his central position but because his face, wig, hands, and linen are bathed in light. The poet's abstraction thus appears a holy or visionary experience, the vital creativity that produced Pope's Homer. Even the poet's gleaming armchair suggests that gentlemanly leisure promotes genius. Pope's pose might represent masculine domination of early eighteenth-century English literature. Proud of their superior educations, complacent in their possession of leisure, genteel and aristocratic men presided over most genres. Women resembled the figure in Jervas's painting: preferably engaged in household tasks, they tiptoed behind the masculine throne.

Such projects as Pope's translation, however, were steadily making classical masterpieces available to the unlettered. Timorously but persistently, women approached texts previously reserved for privileged men. Their responses would be overshadowed by masculine achievements, even as this young women is obscured by Pope's chair. But Pope himself, secure in his domination of the portrait and of the literary scene, facilitated women's conditional access to classical translations, and he later encouraged several as professional writers. In Jervas's painting, the poet's expression is serene and gentle; if he is aware of the young woman behind him, her activity does not irritate him. If this painting intentionally represented Pope and a woman reader, his pose would suggest toleration, at worst benign neglect. The poet refrains from interrupting her surreptitious activity, as the woman grasps a volume disclosing to her a portion of the cultural riches that have palpably enraptured their translator. If the moment dramatized continued, we might see this satin-clad woman glide away with Pope's Homer, and perhaps—after slipping on her shoes—steal into the poet's garden to read his Iliad.

Notes

1. Laura Brown, Alexander Pope (Oxford: B. Blackwell, 1985); Ellen Pollak, The Poetics of Sexual Myth: Gender and Ideology in the Verse of Swift and Pope (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985).

2. Ruth Salvaggio, Enlightened Absence: Neoclassical Configurations of the Feminine (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988).

3. Penelope Wilson, “Engendering the Reader: ‘Wit and Poetry and Pope’ Once More,” in The Enduring Legacy: Alexander Pope Tercentenary Essays, ed. G. S. Rousseau and Pat Rogers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 63, 64-65.

4. Valerie Rumbold, Women's Place in Pope's World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989); Maynard Mack, Alexander Pope: A Life (New York: W. W. Norton, 1986).

5. Donna Landry, The Muses of Resistance: Laboring-Class Women's Poetry in Britain, 1739-1796 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990).

6. Alexander Pope, “A Hymn Written in Windsor Forest,” in Pope, The Poems of Alexander Pope, ed. John Butt et al., 10 vols. (London: Methuen, 1967), 6:194. All further quotations of Pope's poems will be taken from this edition.

7. Maynard Mack discusses possible creative implications of Pope's garden and grotto in Pope, 358-66.

8. Maynard Mack recounts the sad fate of Pope's villa and grounds in The Garden and the City: Retirement and Politics in the Later Poetry of Pope, 1731-1743 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1969), 283 n. 9. Appendix E, “The Legendary Poet,” contains a selection of contemporary poems by male admirers celebrating the garden and grotto (266-71).

9. Maynard Mack reprints part of chant 3 of Jacques Delille's “Les Jardins” (1801) in Garden, 270-71.

10. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu to the Countess of Mar, April 1722, in The Complete Letters of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, ed. Robert Halsband, 3 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1965), 2:15.

11. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, “Her Palace placed beneath a muddy road,” in Essays and Poems and Simplicity, A Comedy, ed. Robert Halsband and Isobel Grundy (Oxford: Clarendon, 1977), 247-51.

12. Elizabeth Carter's report to Rev. Nicolas Carter is quoted by Sylvia Harcstark Myers in The Bluestocking Circle: Women, Friendship, and the Life of the Mind in Eighteenth-Century England (Oxford: Clarendon, 1990), 48.

13. Samuel Johnson, “Ad Elisam Popi Horto Lauros Carpentum,” in Gentleman's Magazine 8 (1738): 372.

14. Gentleman's Magazine 8 (1738): 429 features “The Latin Epigram … Englished” by “Alexis,” an “Imitation of the Latin, by Mr. S[tephe]n D[uc]k,” and “Another” by “Urbanus” (Johnson). Carter's three answers to Johnson's Latin epigram appear on the same page as these tributes.

15. Claudine Herrman describes this as an inevitable aspect of women's writing in a patriarchal culture. See Les Voleuses de langue (Paris: des Femmes, 1976).

16. Worried that Pope and Carter might become friends as the result of her Crousaz translation, Sir George Oxenden warned her father, “there is hardly an instance of a woman of letters entering into an intimacy of acquaintance with men of wit and parts, particularly poets, who were not thoroughly abused and maltreated by them, in print, after some time; and Mr. Pope has done it more than once.” See Carter, Memoirs of the Life of Mrs. Elizabeth Carter, With A New Edition Of Her Poems. … To Which Are Added, Some Miscellaneous Essays In Prose, ed. Rev. Montagu Pennington (London: F. C. Rivington and J. Rivington, 1807), 29-30. Carter, working among the writers at St. John's Gate, was probably well aware of Pope's propensity to insert “dunces” into successive editions of the Dunciad. Crousaz duly appeared in Dunciad 4.198 (1742).

17. Jael Henrietta Pye, A short account, of the principal seats and gardens, in and about Twickenham (London, 1760), vii-viii.

18. Hannah More to Mrs. Gwatkin from Hampton Court, in William Roberts, Memoirs of the Life and Correspondence of Mrs. Hannah More, 2 vols. (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1851), 1:34-35. Maynard Mack speculates that Pope's house may have been extended by June 1760, when Horace Walpole mentions Stanhope's alterations in a letter (Garden, 282 n. 8).

19. The remains of Pope's grotto may still be seen today, by private arrangement with the Sisters of St. Catherine's Convent of Mercy, which occupies the property. When I visited in 1987, the grotto was virtually a dark, dank tunnel, with few traces remaining of Pope's sparkling inset minerals.

20. Ann Yearsley, “Written on a Visit,” in Poems on Various Subjects (London: G. G. J. Robinson and J. Robinson, 1787), 139-43.

21. Anna Seward to Mrs. Childers, 30 March 1804, in Seward's Letters of Anna Seward: Written Between the Years 1784 and 1807, 6 vols. (Edinburgh: A. Constable, 1811), 6:144-46.

22. In his Eighteenth-Century Women Poets: An Oxford Anthology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), Roger Lonsdale speculates that Seward's Original Sonnets (1799) included poems dated from the 1770's that were “reworkings in the increasingly popular sonnet form of earlier poems” (312). Based on its mature technique, I agree with Lonsdale that if Seward wrote this poem in her youth, she probably recast it, after thorough revision, as a sonnet.

23. I paraphrase Anne Finch, countess of Winchilsea, in “The Introduction”: “Alas! a woman that attempts the pen, / Such an intruder on the rights of men, / Such a presumptuous Creature, is esteem'd, / The fault, can by no vertue be redeem'd” (9-12). See Finch, Selected Poems of Anne Finch, Countess of Winchilsea, ed. Katherine M. Rogers (New York: F. Unger, 1979), 5-7.

24. Joseph Wittreich, Feminist Milton (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1987). Wittreich's argument refers not only to women's reception but to ideas about women that Milton placed in the more conservative context of his milieu. Pope's feminine constructions, by contrast, were never deemed revolutionary.

25. Had I attempted a definitive study, this book would have been much longer. Students of eighteenth-century women writers will recognize various omissions, particularly of women playwrights. Discussions of other figures are brief because they have already been treated at length elsewhere. For example, Ann Messenger included a chapter on “Arabella Fermor, 1714 and 1769: Alexander Pope and Frances Moore Brooke” in His and Hers: Essays in Restoration and Eighteenth-Century Literature (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1986), 148-71. Although my opinion of Brooke's novel differs from Messenger's, my discussion of The History of Emily Montague is brief so that I may concentrate on less familiar prose responses. Similarly, Valerie Rumbold treats Mary Wollstonecraft's Popeian allusions in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman; see Rumbold, Women's Place, 265-68. Donna Landry discusses Mary Leapor's second volume in relation to Pope (78-119) and Ann Yearsley's sometimes subtle references (120-85). I hope my study will stimulate further research on all these figures and on the relations between women's and men's poetry and literary criticism in the eighteenth century.

26. William K. Wimsatt reproduces and describes the portrait, probably painted between 1717 and 1720, in The Portraits of Alexander Pope (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1965), 20-23, plate 3.2. Maynard Mack reproduces and discusses the painting in Pope, 341-43.

27. See, for example, Addison's Spectator 10 (12 March 1711), where he describes his ideal: women who “join all the Beauties of the Mind to the Ornaments of Dress, and inspire a kind of Awe and Respect, as well as Love, into their Male-Beholders.” See Addison et al., The Spectator, ed. Donald F. Bond, 5 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1965), 1:46-47.