CRITICISM

Ferguson, Moira. “Mary Collier.” In First Feminists: British Women Writers 1578-1799, pp. 257-58. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985.

Offers a brief biography and an overview of Collier's poetry.

———. Introduction to The Thresher's Labour: Stephen Duck (1736) and The Woman's Labour: Mary Collier (1739), pp. xxx-xxii. Los Angeles: William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, 1985.

Discusses “The Woman's Labour” as a response to Stephen Duck's poem The Thresher's Labour.

———. “Mary Collier: Women's Labor, Gender/Class Identity, and Nation Building.” In Eighteenth-Century Women Poets: Nation, Class, and Gender, pp. 7-27 Albany: State University of New York Press, 1995.

Examines Collier's poetry and its commentary on economics, social conditions, Britain's global transformation and status as colonial power, and gender and class identity.

Landry, Donna. “The Resignation of Mary Collier: Some Problems in Feminist Literary History.” The New Eighteenth Century: Theory, Politics, English Literature, edited by Felicity Nussbaum and Laura Brown, pp. 99-120. New York: Methuen, 1987.

An earlier version of Landry's 1990 essay, reprinted above, in which she argues for the importance of Collier's working-class poetry and the way it challenges contemporary institutional critical and aesthetic criteria as applied to literature.

Additional coverage of Collier's life and career is contained in the following sources published by the Gale Group: Dictionary of Literary Biography, Vol. 95 and Literature Resource Center.