An English Sappho brilliant, young and dead? Mary Leapor laughs at the fathers.
[In the following essay, Landry discusses Leapor as a more radically feminist poet than earlier critics have recognized.]
But no Englishwoman ever wrote verses worthy of being twice read, who had deviated from virtue.
(Blackwood's Magazine [March, 1837], p. 408)
Sappho, Justified, either way
(Ann Yearsley, ms. note in a copy of Poems, on Several Occasions [1785])
Mary Leapor's texts have evidently appealed to a predominantly male literary establishment, for various critics and editors seem to have taken a peculiar pleasure in discovering them, only to have them be forgotten and subsequently rediscovered again and again. Under the auspices of John Watts, Samuel Richardson, and Isaac Hawkins Browne, her works were collected and published posthumously by subscription in 1748 and 1751.1 There follows notice or selected republication of her poems by Christopher Smart in The Midwife (1750), by the Monthly Review (1749 and 1751), by John Duncombe in The Feminead (1754), by George Colman and Bonnell Thornton in Poems by Eminent Ladies (1755), by The Lady's Poetical Magazine (1782), by the Gentleman's Magazine (1784), by Alexander Dyce in Specimens of British Poetesses (1827), by Blackwood's Magazine (1837), by Frederic Rowton in The Female Poets of Great Britain (1848), and, most recently, by Roger Lonsdale in The New Oxford Book of Eighteenth Century Verse (1984) and Eighteenth Century Women Poets: An Oxford Anthology (1989). The writer in Blackwood's comments:
Mary Barber was the wife of a shopkeeper in Dublin, and Mary Leapor a cook, but neither of them had so much of the mens divinior as might have been expected from their occupation. Molly makes Phillis, a country maid, reject the addresses of Sylvanus, a courtier, in favour of Corydon, on the ground of good eating. The lines are savoury.
“Not this will lure me, for I'd have you know,
This night to feast with Corydon I go;
Then beef and colewarts, beans and bacon too,
And the plum-pudding of delicious hue,
Sweet-spiced cakes, and apple-pies good store,
Deck the brown board—and who can wish for more?”(2)
Thus is Leapor claimed for the province of wholesome sentiments and homely virtues, at the same time that she is cleared of any imputation of zealous religiosity—by 1837, the distinguishing mark, it would seem, of a lower-class imagination. Collier's mens divinior, and not her protofeminist polemic or laboring-class testimony, has survived as the chief feature of plebeian verse, after those intervening decades of working-class evangelicalism characterized by Thompson as a displacement of utopian political desires: the chiliasm of despair. Blackwood's Leapor is homely, virtuous, and yet capable of arousing a gustatory pleasure that generates poetical excitement. About this poetical excitement, all her discoverers seem to agree. But not all would stress a homely domesticity as the source of that excitement.
Mary Leapor was born on February 26, 1722 at Marston St. Lawrence in Northamptonshire while her father, Philip Leapor, was gardener to Sir John Blencowe (1642-1726), former Member of Parliament for Brackley, Baron of the Exchequer, Justice of Common Pleas, and Justice of the King's Bench. Five years later, after Blencowe's death, Philip Leapor moved to nearby Brackley with his wife and only daughter and established a nursery. Leapor may have attended the village school or she may have learned to read and write at home, taught by her father and mother who appear to have been literate; her verses were at least initially encouraged by her mother, who was at first pleased with her ten- or eleven-year-old daughter's rhymes, but tried to urge her towards some more profitable employment as she grew older. We know from a copy of the first volume of Leapor's poems, still in the library at Weston and inscribed “Once Kitchen maid at Weston,” that Leapor went into service as a cookmaid at Weston Hall, not far from Brackley, the house of Susannah Jennens, daughter of Sir John Blencowe. Her poetry arguably bears traces of an embarrassing dismissal from service, followed by a return to Brackley to keep house for her widowed father. Leapor's mother was buried about five years before the poet's burial on November 14, 1746.3 Only her father lived to see the publication of her work and gain something from the subscriptions.
Daughter of a nurseryman, Leapor employs precise and evocative language to describe rural plenitude in terms of its horticultural specificity. One of her most often anthologized poems, “The Month of August,” makes good use of her father's fruit trees:
In vain you tempt me while our Orchard bears
Long-keeping Russets, lovely Cath'rine Pears,
Pearmains and Codlings, wheaten Plumbs enough,
And the black Damsons loading the bending Bough.
(23-6)
In this pastoral dialogue between Sylvanus, a courtier, and Phillis, a country maid, Phillis rejects Sylvanus's offer of rank and genteel comforts in favor of the rustic tastes her father's farm and the swain Corydon can satisfy. Few pastoral females answer back their elevated suitors as confidently and richly as Phillis: Leapor's language constructs for both farmers and plants a relatively democratic freedom to be found in agricultural gardening, gardening for use, and in so doing, Phillis's replies give working farm life a definite edge over the constraints of aristocratic ornamentation, gardening for show, with its implications of feudal mastery and subjugation:
No Pruning-knives our fertile Branches teaze,
While yours must grow but as their Masters please.
The grateful Trees our Mercy well repay,
And rain us Bushels at the rising Day.
(27-30)
For Leapor's characters here, Edenic plenitude outdoes mere wealth and rank. Sylvanus is silenced by Phillis's refusal of his desire to provide handsomely for her, and Phillis has the last word:
Let Phillis ne'er, ah never let her rove
From her first Virtue and her humble Grove.
Go seek some Nymph that equals your Degree,
And leave Content and Corydon for me.
(73-6)
This may seem a quintessentially “pastoral” move in one sense, in that country life represents a “simple” contentment not to be found at court, but the idiom of class serves to aestheticize a life of humble tenantry in its difference from the courtly and its continued resistance to it, not in the end to elevate it by absorbing it into upper-class gentility through the discovery of high birth or the making of an elevating marriage.
Leapor is a poet worthy of critical attention for aesthetic reasons that go beyond the interesting ways in which her texts are marked by considerations of class and gender. The beauty of Leapor's verse lies often in its rich linguistic textures, its lively rhythms, and its specificity of natural detail. Though she sometimes sounds like Pope, Swift, Gay, and other eighteenth-century poets in her descriptions, she often slips in words from quite different idioms and notices things that they do not. “On Winter,” for example, contains both a vivid evocation of the physical sensations of outdoor labor in cold weather and some arch reflection on the relation between neoclassical concepts of poetic inspiration and the realities of the English climate to which they remain somewhat alien even after generations of “domestication”:
Poor daggled Urs'la stalks from Cow to Cow,
Who to her Sighs return a mournful Low;
While their full Udders her broad Hands assail,
And her sharp Nose hangs dropping o'er the Pail.
With Garments trickling like a shallow Spring,
And his wet Locks all twisted in a String,
Afflicted Cymon waddles through the Mire,
And rails at Win'fred creeping o'er the Fire.
Say gentle Muses, say, is this a Time
To sport with Poesy and laugh in Rhyme;
While the chill'd Blood, that hath forgot to glide,
Steals through its Channels in a lazy Tide:
And how can Phoebus, who the Muse refines,
Smooth the dull Numbers when he seldom shines.
(27-40)
Ironically, it is the same “unrefined” muse of the rural plebeian poet who gives us such a fresh portrait of “daggled” Ursula, muck-spattered among her cows. Thus Leapor, writing as “Mira,” her usual persona, makes skillful aesthetic use of her vantage-point rather closer to the mire of georgic and pastoral materials than most eighteenth-century poets were accustomed to getting.
Although readers of Leapor may tend to agree that she succeeds most brilliantly in aesthetic terms by challenging some of the traditional assumptions of such popular eighteenth-century genres as the pastoral dialogue and the country-house poem—as in “The Month of August” and Crumble-Hall, respectively—there may be little consensus when Leapor's protofeminism and the possibility of what I will call her sapphic textuality are broached. More sharply and thoroughly than any other plebeian poet of the period, Leapor mounts a critique of the manifold injustices perpetuated by men against women. Filial and familial affections seem strained to their utmost in such texts as The Cruel Parent and The Unhappy Father.4 In “An Essay on Woman” from her second volume, Leapor borrows Popean cadences, parallelism, and antithesis in the interests of a very un-Popean demystification of what it means to be Pope's idealized “softer man”:
Woman—a pleasing, but a short-liv'd Flow'r,
Too soft for Business, and too weak for Pow'r:
A Wife in Bondage, or neglected Maid;
Despis'd, if ugly; if she's fair—betray'd.
'Tis Wealth alone inspires ev'ry Grace,
And calls the Raptures to her plenteous Face.
What Numbers for those charming Features pine,
If blooming Acres round her Temples twine?
Tho' Nature arm'd us for the growing Ill,
With fraudful Cunning, and a headstrong Will;
Yet, with ten thousand Follies to her Charge,
Unhappy Woman's but a Slave at large.
(1-60)
Abruptly, Belinda's dressing-table from the first canto of the Rape of the Lock is stripped of its glamor and mystery, and the crude material base of Belinda's power of attraction is exposed: the “magic” wrought by the sylphs is merely the desirability of wealth, politely disguised. An heiress's plenty will be read in her face; indeed, lovers may not be able to see her features for the superimposed topographical map of her estates she carries there. In “An Essay on Woman,” if not for the first time in English literature—we may think of Farquhar's use of the topos in The Beaux Stratagem, for instance—but with peculiar effectiveness, the feminized landscape of so much English verse literally becomes the beauty in question.
In Leapor's work, not only does marriage begin to seem an impossible institution from a woman's point of view, but women's historical situation is regretted so roundly that the bounds of good-humoured satire seem stretched, to say the least. The poems of Leapor's most often anthologized, poems such as “The Month of August,” quoted by the Blackwood's writer, come from her first volume; the poems most energetically critical of contemporary sexual relations appear in her second, from which few poems have been reprinted. And those few do not include the second “Mira to Octavia,” more obviously hostile towards marriage than the first volume's poem of that title; the proudly separatist Complaining Daphne. A Pastoral; or such acerbic ripostes to the whole tradition of misogynist verse as the “Essay on Woman,” cited above, and “Man the Monarch.”
By sapphic textuality I mean to designate both a critical and an affirmative poetic movement within Leapor's texts. From the critique of contemporary sexual relations, of the heterosexual contract and the institutions of marriage and the family as oppressive to women, an alternative green world of female affection is generated. As we have seen, such alternatives to heterosexual obligation, particularly when they involve literary production, are in this period frequently written under the sign of Sappho. Sappho is synonymous with transgressive female erotic and literary exchange. And the oppressiveness of heterosexual institutions in Leapor's verse necessitates some imaginary alternative or release, generates a powerful investment in “sapphic” relations between women: transgressive of patriarchal authority and heterosexual obligation, highly charged in terms of affect, constituted through writing despite the criticism or indifference of the male literary establishment. Leapor's poetry lends itself to, even invites, a reading sensitive to the possibility of a sapphic or lesbian alternative to heterosexual hegemony. To inhabit imaginatively her pastoral green world of female outlaws, escapees from heterosexuality, we must in some sense become “sapphic” readers, alert to erotic possibilities unthinkable within the heterosexual contract and its endless replication of binary sexual difference, with “men” and “women” the only conceivable sexual agents, forever coupled in relations of dominance and subjection.5 If the study of the socially marginal in terms of class supplements our traditionally restrictd versions of history as written from above, from within a hegemonic framework, it is also the case that:
the deviant, whilst being socially marginal, is culturally central: that in studying the deviant, we are studying the dominant order itself, approaching it through its worst fears and nightmares, approaching it through that which it has to outlaw.6
In order to do justice to the specificities of Leapor's œuvre, then, we should address the question of her relation to Sappho and to a sapphic tradition of transgressive textuality as well as her innovations within traditional poetic genres. And in so doing, we will come to read the dominant culture of Leapor's historical moment in new ways, by reading against the grain of its surfaces, looking for what it has suppressed.
THE “SAPPHIC” MUSE
Leapor's most obvious poetical debt is to Pope, but in a poem from her first volume, “An Hymn to the Morning,” she also compares her verse with Sappho's and finds it wanting:
II.
Mira to Aurora sings,
While the Lark exulting springs
High in Air—and tunes her Throat
To a soft and merry Note;
The Goldfinch and the Linnet join:
Hail Aurora, Nymph divine.
IV.
May this artless Praise be thine,
Soft Clione half divine.
See her snowy Hand she waves,
Silent stand her waiting Slaves;
And while they guard the Silver Reins,
She wanders lonely o'er the Plains.
V.
See those Cheeks of beauteous Dye,
Lovely as the dawning Sky,
Innocence that ne'er beguiles
Lips that wear eternal Smiles:
Beauties to the rest unknown,
Shine in her and her alone.
VI.
Now the Rivers smoother flow,
Now the op'ning Roses glow,
The Woodbine twines her odorous Charms
Round the Oaks supporting Arms:
Lilies paint the dewy Ground,
And Ambrosia breathes around.
VII.
Come, ye Gales that fan the Spring;
Zephyr, with thy downy Wing,
Gently waft to Mira's Breast
Health, Content, and balmy Rest.
Far, O far from hence remain
Sorrow, Care, and sickly Pain.
VIII.
Thus sung Mira to her Lyre,
Till the idle Numbers tire:
Ah! Sappho sweeter sings, I cry,
And the Spiteful Rocks reply,
(Responsive to the jarring Strings)
Sweeter—Sappho sweeter sings.
These verses are hardly sapphic in any technical sense. Indeed the reference to Sappho in the last stanza may seem to come out of nowhere. But there is a clear, anguished interplay between Leapor's usual figuring of herself as “Mira” and the direct intrusion of the poetical “I” who cries out that she has failed to equal Sappho; there is a difference between the explicitly poeticized persona and the more autobiographical, though still highly conventional “I” that the relation to Sappho crystallizes. Leapor's poetry is marked not only by a self-conscious difference from the productions of the literary establishment: the difference that renders “Mira” both “merely” a humble, rustic versifier and someone “mired” in the mud and hardships of a laboring life—the muses' “mirror” on what cannot be seen from the usual literary vantage-point of leisured comfort and urbanity. There is also a difference within Leapor's texts that we could identify as a quandary over the “sapphic question” posed for the reader by this invocation of Sappho: the extent to which Leapor's writing represents female eroticism as transgressive, situates it in relation to sapphic textuality, and exposes the necessary construction of such alternative desires within as well as against the very terms of heterosexual propriety from which they are generated.
“An Hymn to the Morning” is in one sense a poem about thwarted poetic ambition. Singing the beauties of the morning offers keen poetic pleasure, but that pleasure dissipates with the recognition that Mira's performance is merely “idle,” a form of amusement and of summoning the muse, that cannot hope to measure up to any tradition of poetic greatness, even a female one, and that in any case constitutes an “idle” passing of time bound to be found reprehensible in a world of labor. Sappho may represent no more than a superior female poet, an obvious point of comparison for an aspiring woman of letters, but, as we have seen, Sappho's name also functions in this period as a sign of transgressive female desire. If we read “An Hymn to the Morning” in the light of Mira's yearning to match Sappho in poetical sweetness, her technical rivalry with the Lesbian muse—and, more contentiously, her rivalry with Sappho as a wooer of women, her technical rivalry with the lesbian lover—the eroticism of Leapor's textuality becomes distinctly noticeable, though it remains safely mediated by conventional landscape cathexis. The female personifications of neoclassical verse take on a certain aura as objects of desire: Aurora herself, the goddess of the morning; Clione, a descendant of Clio, the muse of history, or human action in time, here rendered only half divine in the person of a local nymph whose beauty replicates, in a way that can be desired, the aesthetic beauties of the morning. To write a hymn to the morning allows one to praise the “snowy Hands,” “Cheeks … Lovely as the dawning Sky,” “Lips that wear eternal Smiles,” and “Beauties to the rest unknown”—an explicitly erotic blazon—while remaining within the boundaries of neoclassical natural description. The woodbine may twine herself round the supporting oak in what seems a traditional topos for heterosexual union, but the only pronouns or other gendered parts of speech in the text are feminine. In this largely feminized landscape, Mira feels inspired and safe; she asks only that the elements sustain her there by bringing continued “Health, Content, and balmy Rest,” that she may never return to the “Sorrow, Care, and sickly Pain” from which she has (poetically) escaped.
What Leapor would have known of Sappho's verse and reputation can only be conjectured. She may well have known Pope's version of Ovid's Sapho to Phaon—Sappho the passionate but tormented lover, once a lover of women but now rejected by a young man—for her library contained among its “sixteen or seventeen single Volumes” “Part of Mr. Pope's Works, Dryden's Fables,” and “Some Volumes of Plays, & c.”7 The recovery of Sappho for eighteenth-century audiences8 depended heavily on translations of Longinus and of Boileau's Traité du Sublime as well as translations of Sappho's odes and fragments from the Greek.9 The most widely disseminated view of Sappho was probably Addison's in the Spectator, and it encapsulates both tendencies towards which Leapor's invocation of Sappho points: towards poetical and aesthetic excitement and towards something so erotic, or erotic in such a way, as to be “dangerous,” though the precise dangers thus engendered must of course not be articulated in order to protect the susceptible reader:
She is called by Ancient Authors the Tenth Muse; and by Plutarch is compared to Cacus the Son of Vulcan, who breathed out nothing but Flame. I do not know, by the Character that is given of her Works, whether it is not for the Benefit of Mankind that they are lost. They were filled with such bewitching Tenderness and Rapture that it might have been dangerous to have given them a Reading.10
The premise of “An Hymn to the Morning” is that Mira has not only “read” Sappho but internalized the sweetness of her lyre as a haunting standard of comparison. “Mira”'s decorum guards against Leapor's “I” breaking into a fully-fledged sapphic discourse—except for that “cry,” which signals implicit failure as well as comparison: the poetry of Mira would be a sapphic production, but it is doomed never to equal the dangerous rupture with mid-eighteenth-century English propriety that such explicitly feminized “Tenderness and Rapture” would constitute. The fragmentary status of Sappho's texts, forever suggestive, never to be exhausted of possible meanings, does not diminish, but rather heightens her symbolic power as a “dangerous” muse. And although there is no direct acknowledgment within Leapor's œuvre of an engagement with the work of Katherine Philips, one of a number of poets described as the “English Sappho,”11 we can trace within their texts similar preoccupations, especially the connection between criticism of the institution of marriage and the cultivation of erotically charged female friendships.
Leapor grounds her critique of heterosexuality in the predatory and tyrannical nature of men's desire for and subjugation of women. Unlike Collier, who attributes “female slavery” to a general degenerative tendency in history, to which both men and women are subject, and which oppresses both sexes though not symmetrically or equally, Leapor attributes it to men's desire for power. Because Man was “greedy of Pow'r,” he envied the greater sexual asymmetry in other, “lesser” species, which seemed to him to bespeak an unqualified male dominance. Happy in his tyranny over the animal kingdom, he could not bear to share power with Woman, and so seized it by ridiculing her into insignificance. Woman's Edenic body was her downfall, for it made her both powerless to resist Man's oppression and threatening to his precarious sense of superiority, which was put in jeopardy when he noticed that male birds had more splendid plumage than females:
When our Grandsire nam'd the feather'd Kind,
Pond'ring their Natures in his careful Mind,
'Twas then, if on our Author we rely,
He view'd his Consort with an envious Eye;
Greedy of Pow'r, he hugg'd the tott'ring Throne;
Pleased with Homage, and would reign alone;
And, better to secure his doubtful Rule,
Roll'd his wise Eye-balls, and pronounc'd her Fool.
The regal Blood to distant Ages runs:
Sires, Brothers, Husbands, and commanding Sons,
The Sceptre claim; and ev'ry Cottage brings
A long Succession of Domestic Kings.
(“Man the Monarch,” 54-65)
For Leapor, this history of domestic despotism is the empirical proof that romantic myths of heterosexual love are insidiously deceptive. “The Temple of Love,” a parody of the dream vision of classical and medieval poetry—a topos which Leapor may have known best through Pope's Temple of Fame—represents heterosexual attraction as a promise of future bliss bleakly dismantled within the text. As an implied narrative of ruined maidenhood, with the “wealthy Swain” taking advantage of the “blooming Damsel” (36) by ceremoniously giving her gifts but not marrying her, the poem adheres to official eighteenth-century precepts. But nowhere in the text are we reassured that a mere wedding ceremony would avert the catastrophe that ensues after the feast of love; and Leapor's poems on marriage itself are no less disaffected than this exposure of the ruined maiden's fate:
Then rush'd Suspicion through the lofty Gate,
With heart-sick Loathing led by ghastly Hate;
And foaming Rage, to close the horrid Band,
With a drawn Poniard in her shaking Hand.
Now like an Earthquake shook the reeling Frame,
The Lamps extinguish in a purple Flame:
One universal Groan was heard, and then
The Cries of Women and the Voice of Men:
Some roar out Vengeance, some for Mercy call;
And Shrieks and Tumult fill the dreadful Hall.
(55-64)
The “temple of love” emblematizes an idolizing of heterosexual desire that is mutually destructive for men and women, but promises women only disillusionment and annihilation: men at least have the pleasures of pursuit and momentary possession of women's bodies and their goods—a fleeting triumph of appropriation, of the seizure of property. The telling difference between the two “Mira to Octavia” poems is the latter's greater emphasis upon the purely instrumental, monetary advantage to be gained by a husband in marrying a woman of means, a predatory regime against which only passionate female friendship can provide any kind of bulwark. The first “Mira to Octavia” concludes playfully:
In spite of all romantick Poets sing;
This Gold, my Dearest, is an useful thing:
.....But if there's none but Florio that will do,
Write Ballads both, and you may thrive—Adieu.
(62-69)
The second poem of this title, however, overrides the first poem's jocular caution—not to marry even for love, unless there are sufficient means—by proposing that any marriage will be likely to end in the unhappiness and oppression of the bride. Spinsterhood is explicitly advocated; Leapor even reassures her audience that she is neither a “Rebel to your Hymen's Law” nor “Foe to Man” (148-50), as if we were bound to accuse her of man-hating when she argues:
And shall Octavia prostitute her Store,
To buy a Tyrant with the tempting Ore?
Besides, I fear your Shackles will be found
Too dearly purchas'd with a thousand Pound.
Then be the charming Mistress of thy Gold;
While young, admir'd; and rev'renc'd, when you're Old.
(154-59)
There are verbal echoes here of Pope's praise of Martha Blount in Epistle to a Lady and of Clarissa's speech to Belinda in the Rape of the Lock, but where Pope explicitly advocates marriage for women, Leapor reverses his advice. Although Pope's good friend Martha was herself a spinster, in order to eulogize her Pope represents her in To a Lady as an exemplary wife and mother; a spinster cannot be represented as exemplary within his prescriptions for proper female behavior. Yet Pope also admits that Martha Blount is saved (implicitly, by her spinsterhood) from a tyrannical husband greedy for control of her property; her property-less state proves a blessing in disguise since she is thus “deny'd the Pelf / That buys your sex a Tyrant o'er itself” (287-88). Ironically, Pope's praise of Martha Blount conveys simultaneously that the ideal female virtues are wifely and maternal, but that the ideal female condition is spinsterhood. Leapor, contrary to her own former protest that she writes not as a rebel to “Hymen's Law,” writes here to challenge the hegemony of romantic love and marriage. A woman of property can only maintain her liberty—and her happiness—if she refuses to buy a “Tyrant o'er [her]self.” And a woman without property, a laboring woman, is unlikely to find happiness at any price except for brief moments of solace in the manner of “complaining Daphne” and Mira herself. We are reminded by the silences in Leapor's texts that the pursuit of happiness as an enabling myth, in terms of official precept accessible to women through romantic love and marriage, remains in this period largely a privilege of bourgeois male subjects. For women and the lower classes, unhappiness is to be endured, not abandoned, even for the pursuit of imaginary alternatives.
Perhaps Leapor's most technically successful intervention against the heterosexist mythologizing of marriage among the upper classes is The Mistaken Lover, in some sense a perverse rewriting of Swift's The Lady's Dressing Room.12 Leapor's Strephon could be read as having overcome his disillusionment with female bodies and their excremental functions sufficiently to marry a Celia who shits. As soon as Strephon has won possession of Celia and her fortune, he loses “interest”—both the excitement of pursuit, and imaginary economic speculation on future gain. As a wife Celia is condemned to loneliness, boredom, and the negation of her own desires and possible agency. The sporting terseness of Swiftian couplets is here deployed to savage the decorum of loveless gentry marriages of (in)convenience rather than English policies regarding Ireland or corruption in Sir Robert Walpole's administration:
'Twas half a Year—It might be more,
Since Celia brought her shining Store,
Five thousand Pounds of Sterling clear,
To bless the Mansion of her Dear.
Some tell us Wives their Beauties lose,
When they have spoil'd their bridal Shoes:
Some learned Casuists make it clear,
A Wife might please for half a Year:
And others say, her Charms will hold
As long as the suspended Gold;
But that her Bloom is soon decay'd,
And wither'd when her Fortune's paid.
(53-64)
The rule of the fathers renders Strephon, even as a negligent husband, the legal dictator of his wife's future, and he lays down the law of civil decorum as follows: once there was romance between them, as a courting couple,
“But now, my Dearest, as you see
“In mutual Hatred we agree,
“Methinks 'tis better we retreat,
“Each Party to a distant Seat;
“And tho' we value each the other,
“Just as one Rush regards another:
“Yet let us often send to hear,
“If Health attend the absent Dear:
“And tho' each other we would shun,
“As Debtors do a hateful Dun:
“(Nor mind the crossing of a Street)
“Yet let's be civil when we meet,
“And live in short like courtly Friends:
“They part—and thus the Story ends.
(167-80)
The end of the story between courtiers and between husband and wife means the end of intrigue, of “plotting” in the conventional and technical senses, and the end of desire, the narrative motor. For Leapor, perhaps the cruellest aspect of male desire is its capricious and self-serving brevity.
Leapor's most explicitly separatist poem, in which the mutability of male desire is villified, and the only refuge is to be found in female affection, is a pastoral to end all heterosexual complaints, Complaining Daphne. A Pastoral. Abandoned by Cynthio, Daphne strives to control her passion and remorse, but only in recalling her mother's early love for her and the warnings she received at her mother's knee about men's predatory natures can she steel herself to resolution. During the hottest part of the day, Daphne and her mother would rest from weeding or hay-making by sitting in the shade, and her mother would tell (anti)romantic tales about the perils of heterosexual entanglement:
Long Tales she told, to kill the tedious Hour;
Of lovely Maids to early Ruin led,
Who once were harmless as the Flocks they fed;
Of some induc'd with gaudy Knights to roam
From their dear Parents, and their blissful Home;
Till, each deserted by her changing Friend,
The pageant Wretches met a woful End.
And still howe'er the mournful Tale began,
She always ended—Child, beware of Man.
(91-99)
Daphne's response to this remembrance is to pledge obedience to her mother's memory by forgetting Cynthio and embracing her sister shepherdesses. In a triumph of renunciation of heterosexual closure in marriage, the poem ends with a celebration of the tranquillity and harmony to be found when women choose to live only for each other, in a feminine pastoral paradise, a sapphic idyll:
Yes, sacred Shade! you shall Obedience find;
I'll banish Cynthio from my sickly Mind.
Come, sweet Content, and long-desired Rest!
Two welcome Strangers! to my aking Breast:
Purl on, ye Streams! ye Flow'rets, smile again!
Your chearful Daphne shall no more complain:
Haste, Philomela, with thy charming Lay,
And tune thy Chorals to the falling Day:
Ye Sylvan Sisters! come; ye gentle Dames,
Whose tender Souls are spotless as your Names!
Henceforth shall Daphne only live for you;
Content—and bid the lordly Race Adieu;
See the clear Streams in gentler Murmurs flow,
And fresher Gales from od'rous Mountains blow.
Now the charm'd Tempest from my Bosom flies:
Sweet Slumber seizes on my willing Eyes.
Ye Winds, no more I ask the tempting Swain:
Go fan the Sweets of yonder flow'ry Plain.
(100-17)
Leapor's only available language for reproducing the elusive pleasures of this idyll is the language of sleep, the bliss of sleep after the turn in a dangerous fever. Not boredom, the sleep of dullness, but peace and a return to the pleasurable, maternally guarded safety of childhood are to be found here. This Daphne too, it would seem, takes her pleasure primarily by escaping—from hot-eyed, masculine embraces and the torments of subsequent abandonment.
To read these rejections of the fugitive pleasures of heterosexuality as a puritanical rejection of the body and its appetites would be to occlude the sensuousness of Leapor's verse, its appeals to visual and gustatory pleasures. The traditional designation of pastoral as a safe and suitable genre for female poets provides an excuse for pastoral veneration of female bodies in such poems as “An Hymn to the Morning,” as we have seen. In “Man the Monarch,” the conventions of heterosexual blazon are doubly ironized as an historical liability as well as an imprisoning ideology, a legacy of Edenic myth. Speculating on the origins of gender relations, Leapor rewrites Genesis in order to explain Man's “despotic Sway” (5). Unlike Collier's mythical Golden Age, which begins with the sexes ostensibly enjoying mutual harmony until custom stales affection, Leapor's begins with Man, “insolently vain” (7), tyrannizing over the animals, whom Heaven allows to escape into remote places like caves, oceans, and the sky. Faced with such a scene, “But where! ah! where, shall helpless Woman fly?” (23). Woman, the daughter of a complacent Mother Nature pleased with her own handiwork, is told simply to “live, and reign” (29), until the moment of an ambiguous “now,” simultaneously mythico-historical and contemporary with the scene of reading, when Mother Nature realizes her mistake: “Beholds a Wretch, whom she design'd a Queen, / And weeps that e'er she form'd the weak Machine” (30-33).
In a passage of complex irony, Leapor mocks the traditional anatomization of female beauty to be found in love lyrics by men while pointing out how inappropriate to domestic drudgery such a notion of femininity is:
In vain she boasts her Lip of scarlet Dyes,
Cheeks like the Morning, and far-beaming Eyes;
Her Neck refulgent—fair and feeble Arms,
A Set of useless and neglected Charms.
She suffers Hardship with afflictive Moans:
Small Tasks of Labour suit her slender Bones.
Beneath a Load her weary Shoulders yield,
Nor can her Fingers grasp the sounding Shield;
She sees and trembles at approaching Harms,
And Fear and Grief destroy her fading Charms.
Then her pale Lips no pearly Teeth disclose,
And Time's rude Sickle cuts the yielding Rose.
Thus wretched Woman's short-liv'd Merit dies:
In vain to Wisdom's sacred Help she flies;
Or sparkling Wit but lends a feeble Aid:
'Tis all Delirium from a wrinkled Maid.
(34-49)
Idealized femininity remains ambiguous in Leapor's texts, subject to demystification as oppressive, yet returned to again and again, obsessively. Women's bodies often figure in Leapor's verse as objects preyed upon by time and cruelly devalued by social custom as time passes. Indeed the description of female beauty and the regretful chronicling of decay are usually linked in Leapor's work. This combination may seem reminiscent of Swift's preoccupation with decaying bodies as specifically female bodies, as if the idealization of femininity made bodily functions and mortality more textually grotesque than their representation by means of a male body could ever do.
But unlike Swift, who renders the decaying body outrageously grotesque, Leapor avoids satirical inventories of bodily decay in favor of brief allusions. And those brief allusions interweave from poem to poem to form a network of sisterly advice and consolation. At moments of extremity, women may openly comfort one another sensuously and passionately. In “Colinetta,” the poetical heroine delivers her last verses from her deathbed on Lydia's lap (Leapor's œuvre is replete with premonitions and prefigurations of her own premature death): “On Lydia's Lap pale Colinetta lay; / … At last reviv'd, on Lydia's Neck she hung, / And like the Swan expiring thus she sung” (14-22).
Unlike Pope, Leapor does not find aging beauties necessarily either ludicrous or contemptible, though derision and contempt are the options socially on offer. Rather, with a sympathy that may seem older than her years, in a poem like Dorinda at her Glass—the ambitious poem that opens her first volume and foregrounds metaphors of mirroring—Leapor recommends comforting, not chastising, the body as it ages. The mirror, which allegorically betokens female vanity and keeps Dorinda a slave to arduous rituals that in time are doomed to fail, will be supplanted in this poem by Dorinda's advice to her sisters not to fight time.
More generally in Leapor's œuvre, the mirror that Mira's verse represents offers to supplement a female audience's collective imaginary sense of themselves in the hope of displacing such damaging and constraining self-representations. Coquettes and belles need not be ridiculous when time gains the upper hand in their struggle to maintain their desirability as a means to power. For Pope:
Beauties, like Tyrants, old and friendless grown,
Yet hate Repose, and dread to be alone,
Worn out in public, weary ev'ry eye,
Nor leave one sigh behind them when they die.
Still round and round the Ghosts of Beauty glide,
And haunt the places where their Honour dy'd.
(Epistle to a Lady, 227-42)
For Leapor, it seems possible to face age with dignity by accommodating oneself to small bodily comforts rather than the theatrical staging of beauty. Her advice is both sartorial:
Let Isabel unload her aking Head
Of twisted Papers, and of binding Lead;
Let sage Augusta now, without a Frown,
Strip those gay Ribbands from her aged Crown;
Change the lac'd Slipper of delicious Hue
For a warm Stocking, and an easy Shoe;
(88-93)
and philosophical:
Hear this, ye fair Ones, that survive your Charms,
Nor reach at Folly with your aged Arms;
Thus Pope has sung, thus let Dorinda sing;
“Virtue, brave Boys,—'tis Virtue makes a King:”
Why not a Queen? fair Virtue is the same
In the rough Hero, and the smiling Dame:
Dorinda's Soul her Beauties shall pursue,
Tho' late I see her, and embrace her too:
Come, ye blest Graces, that are sure to please,
The Smile of Friendship, and the careless Ease;
The Breast of Candour, the relenting Ear,
The Hand of Bounty, and the Heart sincere:
May these the Twilight of my Days attend,
And may that Ev'ning never want a Friend
To smooth my Passage to the silent Gloom,
And give a Tear to grace the mournful Tomb.
(120-35)
Rejecting any sexually based or gender-specific distinction between masculine and feminine virtues, Leapor equates the sexes morally in order to distinguish them on the grounds of affective economy. In an historical moment when a woman's “honor” was primarily sexually construed, to claim that virtue is the same in the “rough Hero” and the “smiling Dame” is a bold claim, certainly more radical in its implications that Pope's notion of ideal women as softer men, or even a logically possible counter-notion of men's needing to become more like women in order to become “fully human.” And again we find the nexus of beauty's decay and female friendship easing the prospect of “friendless” death in a world where men only befriend women for their beauty. Where “beauty” is not a weapon in marriage-market or marital conflict, its loss matters relatively little. On her deathbed, Leapor's Dorinda hopes to be comforted by, not a husband, lover, father, brother, or child, but by a “Friend,” which in the context of this poem “by” a woman on behalf of her sex, will almost certainly strike us as designating a female friend.
From what we know of Leapor's experience of patronage, female friendship was crucial to her literary enterprise. Her short and “blameless” life, so free from scandal that one of her patrons, at least, commented that her character “was such as would have been ornamental in a much higher Sphere, to which in all Probability, if it had pleased God to spare her Life, her own Merit would have raised her,”13 seems to have been devoted entirely to her parents, one childhood friend figured in the Essay on Friendship as Fidelia (39-45), a circle of young women whom Leapor possibly met at Weston Hall,14 and Bridget Freemantle, foremost among her female patrons, who appears in Leapor's verses as Artemisia. As a clergyman's daughter, Freemantle seems to have been well-bred without ostentation; as a spinster whose father had died twenty-six years before, and who lived with her widowed mother, she was sympathetic to Leapor's poverty and obscurity. According to Richard Greene, the name Artemisia “refers to a ruler of Rhodes known for having fostered the arts.”15 Appropriate as this reference is for a patron, I would suggest that the name might well contain another allusion to a better-known classical figure—Artemis, virgin goddess of the hunt, through whom the name “Artemisia” would point towards both militant, if not amazonian, singleness and the cult of unfettered female friendship. Most importantly, Freemantle, living in a nearby village with her ailing mother, seems to have had time and inclination to take an active interest in Leapor's writing and to visit her frequently, as described in such poems as “To Artemisia. Dr. King's Invitation to Bellvill: Imitated.” She even supplied Leapor with some family memorabilia, “an old manuscript Pastoral of Mr. Newton's, in Blank Verse” which Leapor liked so much she rhymed parts of it and insisted upon acknowledging Newton in her published volumes; this Mr. Newton was probably Bridget Freemantle's maternal grandfather.16
As a patron, Freemantle seems to have been both devoted to promoting Leapor's career and sensitive to her feelings. Her anonymous account of Leapor in the second volume strikes one by its self-effacement and absence of class prejudice, though it is by no means innocent of class distinctions. Freemantle goes so far as to worry whether her interest in Leapor might prove something of an annoyance to a young woman of the servant class, a cookmaid, who, sometime after her mother's death in 1742 and probably in the first six months of 1745, when she was dismissed from service,17 kept house for her father without anyone to assist her. After proposing a subscription edition of her poems to Leapor, that she might be able to buy more time in which to write (presumably by hiring a servant), Freemantle indulges herself by calling often to observe Leapor's progress in composing new verses:
My expressing some Fear of being troublesome in coming so frequently, occasioned a great Variety of Invitations, both in Verse and Prose; which I could seldom resist: And indeed her whole Behaviour to me was so extremely good-natur'd and obliging, that I must have been the most ungrateful Person in the World, if I had not endeavour'd to make some Return.
From this Time to that of her Death, few Days pass'd in which I did not either see or hear from her; for she gave me the Pleasure of seeing all her Poems as soon as they were finish'd. And though I never was extremely fond of Poetry, and don't pretend to be a Judge of it, there was something so peculiarly pleasing to my Taste in almost every thing she wrote, that I could not but be infinitely pleas'd with such a Correspondent.
Nor did I admire her in her Poetical Capacity only; but the more I was acquainted with her, the more I saw Reason to esteem her for those virtuous Principles, and that Goodness of Heart and Temper, which so visibly appeared in her; and I was so far from thinking it a Condescension to cultivate an Acquaintance with a Person in her Station, that I rather esteem'd it an Honour to be call'd a Friend to one in whom there appear'd such a true Greatness of Soul as with me far outweigh'd all the Advantages of Birth and Fortune. Nor did I think it possible for any body that was as well acquainted with her as myself, to consider her as a mean Person.18
In the case of Leapor and Freemantle, it would seem that we have an example of female alliance across class lines that succeeded where More's patronage of Yearsley failed: in the cultivation of a strong friendship that allowed each woman access to the other's sensitivities. There is also, of course, no question of a possible literary rivalry between patron and protégée, since Freemantle does not even “pretend” to critical, yet alone creative, abilities. And Leapor's premature death put an end to the alliance before it had to stand the test of time—and of possible conflicts over the eventual financial arrangements that publication by subscription was likely to induce.
If the addresses to Artemisia and her female acquaintance tend to be chaste gestures of friendship and sisterly solidarity:
To Artemisia.—'Tis to her we sing,
For her once more we touch the sounding String.
'Tis not to Cythera's Reign nor Cupid's Fires,
But sacred Friendship that our Muse inspires.
A Theme that suits Æmilia's pleasing Tongue:
So to the Fair Ones I devote my Song
(Essay on Friendship, 1-6)
usually represented within Mira's humble surroundings:
If Artemisia's Soul can dwell
Four Hours in a tiny Cell,
(To give that Space of Bliss to me)
I wait my Happiness at three.
(“To Artemisia. Dr. King's Invitation to Bellvill: Imitated,” 1-4)
Leapor's sisterly strain is sometimes vexed by betrayal on the part of other female would-be friends and patrons. Sometimes the bored frivolity of leisured women leads them to seek out Mira's most recent literary productions for their own amusement—one of the liabilities of her “discovery”:
Yet some Impertinence pursues me still;
And so I fear it ever must, and will.
So soft Pappilia o'er the Table bends
With her small Circle of insipid Friends;
Who wink, and stretch, and rub their drowsy Eyes,
While o'er their Heads Imperial Dulness flies.
“What can we do? We cannot stir for Show'rs:
“Or what invent, to kill the irksome Hours?
“Why, run to Leapor's, fetch that idle Play:
“'Twill serve to laugh at all the live-long Day.”
Preferment great! To beat one's weary Brains,
To find Diversion only when it rains!
(An Epistle to Artemisia. On Fame, 167-78)
The dunce-like dullness of the idle female gentry offends Leapor as much as Artemisia's cultivation pleases her. Such torpid inactivity of mind in a body rendered idle by the weather is crucially linked to the desire for cruel amusement at the socially humbler, and more industrious, Mira's expense.
In “The Disappointment” from volume ii, the “Half-promised” receipt of cast-off clothing from the artful but thoughtless Sophronia tantalizes Mira into visions of sartorial grandeur, only to have such visions dashed by Sophronia's forgetfulness:
When you, Sophronia, did my Sense beguile
With your Half-promise, and consenting Smile;
What Shadows swam before these dazled Eyes!
Fans, Lace, and Ribbands, in bright Order rise:
Me thought these Limbs your silken Favours found,
And thro' streight Entries brush'd the rustling Gown;
While the gay Vestment of delicious Hue
Sung thro' the Isle, and whistled in the Pew.
Then, who its Wearer, by her Form shall tell:
No longer Mira, but a shining Belle.
Such Phantoms fill'd these giddy Brains of mine;
Such golden Dreams on Mira's Temples shine;
Till stern Experience bid her Servant rise,
And Disappointment rubb'd my drowsy Eyes.
Do thou, Sophronia, now thy Arts give o'er,
Thy little Arts; for Mira's Thoughts no more
Shall after your imagin'd Favours run,
Your still-born Gifts, that ne'er behold the Sun.
(1-18)
As J. Jean Hecht has shown, “When servants were engaged, they were frequently granted the right to the ‘cast clothes’ of the master or mistress as a regular perquisite.”19 For female servants, this perquisite most often accompanied upper-servant status; the lady's maid in particular might have “a sumptuous wardrobe of her own” (Hecht, p. 122). The cookmaid, however, was lowest in rank among female servants. For Mira, Sophronia's gift of a silk dress is an exceptional offer, not the rule. “Me thought these Limbs your silken Favours found, / And thro' streight Entries brush'd the rustling Gown”: Mira's imagination, stirred by Sophronia's “little Arts” of exciting desire, projects the cookmaid-poet, all “limbs,” eager to feel silk against arms and legs, into Sophronia's cast-off gown, and into a new intimacy with the superior Sophronia and her “silken Favours.” Thus gloriously dressed, Mira brushes and rustles her way into the primary public arena of the respectable female poor in an English village, the parish church, whose “streight Entry,” like Bunyan's wicket gate, is easier of access for the humble poor than the rich or vainly aspiring. Mira's history of straitened circumstances and strait-laced piety competes with her newly awakened vanity and sensuality in these lines, until “stern Experience” gets the upper hand, forcing Mira to recognize that nothing has changed, that disappointment is eminent, and that Sophronia is as untrustworthy and forgetful of her subordinates as ever, her “Favours” merely imaginary, her “Gifts” “still-born.”
It is tempting to read the poem that follows “The Disappointment”—“The Consolation”—as a response to such class-specific vicissitudes. In “The Consolation” Leapor returns to her preoccupation with death and funerary arrangements, this time anticipating Gray in presenting a humble, rustic grave as the equal of any queen's because death is the great leveller, the final social transformation in which class will cease to matter. Leapor will have none of the literary tradition of marble monuments, so often meretricious in their grandeur,
But the plain Stone with Chizel form'd,
But rudely shapen and adorn'd;
Inscrib'd with—“Natus Anno Dom'
“Here lies Mary in this Tomb.”
And there's no odds, that I can spy,
'Twixt Mary Queen of Scots and I.
So Poets, so shall Critics fall,
Cits, Wits, and Courtiers, Kings and all,
Hands that wrote or held a Flail,
Tongues that us'd to sooth or rail;
Rivals there no more contend,
And there Ambition finds an End.
(25-36)
Despite her attachment to upper-class female patrons and her related protests against women's slavery within the family and marriage, Leapor is a poet of class consciousness as well.
Here, though more implicitly than Collier, Leapor links her own situation with Stephen Duck's—he whose hands both wrote and held the thresher's flail. She does not mention him by name, but as Hannah More's memory of him in 1784 testifies, his status as a plebeian poetical genius functions as an eighteenth-century paradigm. It is interesting to note that Duck subscribed to Leapor's first volume. But he remains embedded in her poetical text not as a deracinated thresher-clergyman, the “Rever. Mr. Stephen Duck,” subscriber, but as forever the paradoxical thresher-poet whose hands could both labor and write when inspired by the rustic muse.
In a letter included in her second volume, which concerns the publication of her poems, Leapor goes so far as to deny that Duck's “situation”—his status as a laboring poet, hence a “curiosity”—was crucial to his literary popularity, given that he had obtained Queen Caroline's favor:
concerning Stephen Duck, I am of Opinion, that it was not his Situation, but the Royal Favour, which gained the Country over to his Side; and therefore I think it needless to paint the Life of a Person, who depends more upon the Curiosity of the World, than its Good-nature. Besides, the seeing myself described in Print would give me the same Uneasiness as being stared at. For this Reason, whenever my Verses shall appear amongst the Public, I hope they will excuse the Author in this Particular.20
Here Leapor's gender- and class-specific modesty, her embarrassment at the thought of being offered to the public as a curiosity, contributes to the ideological occlusion of Duck's class position—and her own—as inextricably bound up with their literary reception in the period by royalty and the middle classes alike. Within her poems Leapor appears to be striving for an idealized aesthetic ground of equivalence between her work and the texts of such poetic exemplars as Sappho, Pope, and Swift. The patronage of Bridget Freemantle apparently supported and reinforced this desire. But Leapor's poems also exhibit signs of struggle between a class allegiance that could not be merely taken for granted, and the upwardly mobile tendency of literary imitation in the period. Although Leapor herself may not have been able or willing to see the inevitability of a middle-class public's interest in the laboring-class “prodigy” as such, her texts remain testaments to the very dynamic of literary success and social subordination that she would have preferred to repudiate.
Despite, therefore, the frequent conjuncture between sapphic feeling, Popean or Swiftian imitation, and a certain upwardly mobile ambition in Leapor's verse—to be intimate with the world of fine ladies established most thoroughly as poetical terrain by Pope, to be as aesthetically successful a poet of “the feminine” as he was, and to be capable of Swiftian demystification of idealized femininity, as well—Leapor does not write as such a lady but as an intimate outsider: as a domestic servant, in short, for whom the cast-off silk dress remains both desirable and risible. The dangers represented by Leapor's sapphic muse are thus as much social as sexual: if sisterly alliances, affective and professional, can be formed across class lines, not only families and class hierarchies but the male literary establishment might be threatened by their social effects.
PATRONAGE AND PATRONIZING RELATIONS
To focus exclusively on the implications of Leapor's sapphic muse or the importance placed on female friendship in her work would be to misread the social context in which her discovery and publication took place. Like Collier's, Leapor's subscription lists contain the names of more men (505) than women (277), though in the list accompanying her second (and arguably, more protofeminist) volume, women (173) outnumber men (111). The proposals for her subscription may have been drawn up by Garrick;21 Samuel Richardson, Christopher Smart, Isaac Hawkins Browne, John Duncombe, John Watts, and James Roberts were involved in the publication and promotion of her work;22 as late as 1784, the Gentleman's Magazine quoted a line from “Colinetta” as particularly evocative;23 and as late as 1791, William Cowper cited Leapor's poems as significantly exceptional examples of “strong natural genius.”24 For all Bridget Freemantle's devotion, and apparent success at interesting her friends in Leapor's work, it was still necessary for her to approach important men of letters if Leapor were to be launched as a literary discovery.
Ironically, literary critics and men of letters are represented with suspicion and hostility in Leapor's verse. She writes as if only sycophants and charlatans have come within her ken, either refusing to criticize helpfully for fear of offending, or refusing to read her work at all out of sheer class and gender prejudice. The pressure of composing quickly causes Leapor to lose confidence in her ability not to write like a hack; she seeks help from “Vido,” who offers only vacuous praise, implying that he too has been so contaminated by the Grub-street ethos that he possesses no judgment or taste:
“Pray, Vido, look on these: Methinks they smell
“Too much of Grub-street: That myself can tell.”
“Not so indeed, they're easy and polite.
“And can you bear 'em?”
“I could read till Night.”
(An Epistle to Artemisia. On Fame, 127-30)
The situation of the plebeian female poet at the hands of male critics is most vigorously dramatized in Leapor's “Minutius. Artemisia. A Dialogue.” At the request of the female patron, Mira's poems are scrutinized by the pedantic “Minutius,” though they are not “read.” Artemisia has hopes of the critic's appreciating both the form and content of her protégée's verse, but the microscopically inclined Minutius cannot get beyond Mira's unschooled handwriting and punctuation. Artemisia declares, “That you should mark,—was my Intention, / Her Thought, her Language, and Invention” (49-50). Minutius's comments display his socio-sexual prejudices rather than his critical acumen:
Minutius.
He! he!—Are these the Verses then?
She wrote 'em with a filthy Pen.
As I'm a Gentleman, I vow
I never saw the like till now:
There's not a Stop throughout the Song;
Or, if there is, 'tis planted wrong:
The hideous Scrawl offends my Sight:
But how should she know how to write
'Tis time to lay all Science by,
If such as she must versify.
(37-46)
And “lay all Science by” is just what Minutius proceeds to do, proving himself so incapable of a critical judgment, or even of a reading of the verses in question, that we must query his reputation as a man of letters. By contrast, Leapor's poetical talents come off well in this production. We must leave the poem feeling that a new literary era, in which pompous literary bores will be replaced by witty and unprejudiced writers and readers, has been initiated. This democratization of the literary scene, with its implicit feminism couched as a feminization, is a brave gesture on Leapor's part, especially given her dependence on the goodwill of certain literary gentlemen.
Despite these overt criticisms of the quasi-scientific club of gentlemen-critics, Leapor's poetry seems to have pleased that club, and to have gone on pleasing it, right through Roger Lonsdale's recent recuperation. This formal agility or air of openness, “ease,” and pleasantry, that must be seen to be duplicitous if we are to foreground the radical possibilities of Leapor's texts, extends to the social space of her own class origins and her family as well, the space from which she situates her writing as a scene of conflict.
Although, like Collier and Yearsley, she seems to have received at home the rudiments of an education and even initial encouragement, so long as writing verses was perceived as a childish pastime, once her writing promised to distract her from “more profitable Employment,” it was discouraged. These details are to be found in Freemantle's epistolary account. She reports being told by Leapor's father that Mary (or Molly):
was always fond of reading every thing that came in her way, as soon as she was capable of it; and that when she had learnt to write tolerably, which, as he remembers, was at about ten or eleven Years old, She would often be scribbling, and sometimes in Rhyme; which her Mother was at first pleas'd with: But finding this Humour increase upon her as she grew up, when she thought her capable of more profitable Employment, she endeavour'd to break her of it; and that he likewise, having no Taste for Poetry, and not imagining it could ever be any Advantage to her, join'd in the same Design: But finding it impossible to alter her natural Inclination, he had of late desisted, and left her more at Liberty. … she always chose to spend her leisure Hours in Writing and Reading … insomuch that some of the Neighbours that observ'd it, expressed their Concern, lest the Girl should over-study herself, and be mopish.25
The disturbing possibilities suggested by that phrase “endeavour'd to break her of it” are many; Leapor's strength of will in proving to her parents that “it [was] impossible to alter her natural Inclination” must have been positively formidable. The neighborly concern of those who cannot understand a literary disposition is ruthlessly satirized in Leapor's An Epistle to Artemisia. On Fame:
Parthenia cries, “Why, Mira, you are dull,
“And ever musing, till you crack your Skull;
“Still poking o'er your What-d'ye-call—your Muse:
“But pr'ythee, Mira, when dost clean thy Shoes?”
Then comes Sophronia, like a barb'rous Turk:
“You thoughtless Baggage, when d'ye mind your Work?
“Still o'er a Table leans your bending Neck:
“Your Head will grow prepost'rous, like a Peck.
“Go, ply your Needle: You might earn your Bread;
“Or who must feed you when your Father's dead?”
She sobbing answers, “Sure, I need not come
“To you for Lectures; I have store at home.
“What can I do?”
“—Not scribble.”
“—But I will.”
“Then get thee packing—and be aukward still.”
(149-62)
Here Pope's refusal to stop writing, despite the advice of friends, in the First Satire of the Second Book of Horace26 enables Leapor's defiance, and perhaps her dismissal from service. According to this poem at least, her willful scribbling caused her to be sent packing from her sojourn in the great world at Weston Hall, back to her father's house, just as Pope's writing advertised his sticking close to home at Twickenham, in the light of his disaffection from court and ministry, rather than sojourning in London. This passage also vividly summarizes the objections to writing as an employment for members of the laboring classes expressed so frequently in the eighteenth-century discourse on patronage. The fact that here the uneducated make colloquial objections lightens the tone considerably, though the potential power of a “store” of parental “Lectures” at home forbidding composition lingers ominously. The Turkish prejudice is deployed, as usual, to suggest an alien form of tyranny intruding itself on native domestic peace; if only these people would leave Mira alone with her muse! But Mira's bookishness contradicts the cleanliness, neatness, and industry with which the respectable poor were expected to identify, and which were clearly demanded of domestic servants. As Mr. Leapor confided to Bridget Freemantle, the possible utility or material “Advantage” to be gained by writing poetry rarely if ever entered the heads of the poor, or their employers. Only by plying her needle and minding the work of the gentleman's kitchen and the cottager's household could a Mary Leapor normally expect to earn her bread, and so keep the need for parish relief at bay. A certain class consciousness would seem to be unavoidable given these conditions. But Leapor's texts posit a familial struggle as well.
Leapor's tragedy, The Unhappy Father, which she once described as “a Piece I most value,”27 disrupts the privileged atmosphere of a gentleman's country house by disclosing the seething rivalries and resentments that threaten to pull apart the propertied patriarchal household, still feudal in its extended network of kin and servants but bourgeois in its claustrophobic centering on a single figure: Dycarbus, the landowner-patriarch. Dycarbus is complacently intoxicated by the “royal” good looks of his offspring:
When round my plenteous Table I behold
My lovely Daughter, with her noble Spouse;
And next to them my two majestic Sons,
Who look as tho' they were of royal Lineage,
And born to give obedient Kingdoms Law;
Methinks I flourish like the spreading Vine,
Whose curling Branches are with Clusters hung,
That draw their Juices from its friendly Stem.
(i.iii. 4-11)
But he is nevertheless willful in his disposition of their affective lives:
'Tis true, Eustathius is giv'n to Storms,
.....These little jars, that shake the Stream of Peace,
And vex the Spirits of these angry Lovers,
A Father's Care must dissipate, and join
These adverse Winds in one united Blast:
With him I've met Success; and over her
I claim th' Authority of paternal Power.
(i.iii. 12-20)
Dycarbus's fumbling interventions between rival brothers and cousins in love with the same women will nearly empty the stage by the play's conclusion.
More tellingly, the poem The Cruel Parent presents an iconography of paternal despotism and daughterly humiliation scarcely to be met with elsewhere in eighteenth-century verse. Celia is held prisoner by her father Lysegus, we know not why: implicit in his cruelty may be a suggestion that she once disobeyed him, but all that the text reveals is that her very existence is abhorrent to him. No mention of a mother is made. The poem is not only Gothic in its gloomy quasi-medieval furnishings but also in its designation of extreme emotions as seemingly groundless and inexplicable, as givens posited for their terrifying effects. Lysegus unlocks Celia's prison, only to silence her plea for mercy with a punitive lecture:
But see Lysegus, her relentless Sire,
Whose Eye-balls sparkl'd with disdainful Ire;
His potent Hand the sounding Locks obey,
With grating Noise the horrid Gates gave way:
Then prostrate at his Feet the Damsel lay.
And am—Oh am I—by my Parent curs'd;
Of all my Woes the deepest and the worst:
She said—Lysegus answer'd in a Rage,
Hence vile Disturber of my luckless Age:
Think not by Tears this stubborn Heart to win,
Nor jar my Senses with thy hateful Din:
Go learn of Vagrants (fit Companions) go,
Their Arts of Stealing and their Whine of Woe.
Yet when before the Gate of Pride you stand,
And crave your Morsel at the Porter's hand;
May some stern Slave present the coming Prize,
Thrown to the Dogs before thy longing Eyes:
He ceas'd—but Celia views no more the Sun.
(61-94)
Such an effective patriarch is he, his words embodying his will as Law, that his daughter falls dead at his feet.
The cultural precedents for representations of the cruelty of patriarchal oppression available to Leapor are many. In “The Temple of Love” Leapor describes herself reading Jane Shore (4) before going to bed to dream horrifically. There is little reason to seek autobiographical causes for Leapor's protofeminist protests. She does, however, situate her writing as necessitating the defiance of her parents', and later, her employers' will. For Leapor, then, the scene of writing itself is a site of resistance to a culture organized round productive labor, defined as “not writing,” in which patriarchal relations govern servants within households like daughters within nuclear families. Bridget Freemantle's account represents Mr. Leapor as saying that after years of struggling to break Leapor of her writing habit, he had “desisted, and left her more at Liberty”: ironically, an image of freedom as unchaining that fits uncomfortably with Leapor's poetical scenarios of cruel paternal restriction, if not actual imprisonment, as in The Cruel Parent. And according to Freemantle, Leapor's deathbed request was that the subscription scheme be carried out for the benefit of her father; is there not some bleak poetic justice in Leapor's writing, against which her father had argued and lectured, contributing to the greater ease of his old age? It may be taken as a generous gesture of filial devotion, to be sure, but Leapor's texts point to a more complex subjective negotiation, in which the daughter proves, by dying and earning, the legitimacy of her defiance of her father's will and his limited opinion of her abilities. Freemantle writes, reporting one of Leapor's deathbed conversations:
“… —I find I am going.—I always lov'd my Father; but I feel it now more than “ever.—He is growing into Years.—My Heart bleeds to see the Concern he is in; and “it would be the utmost Satisfaction to me, if I could hope any thing of mine could “contribute to his comfortable subsistence in his old Age.28
In the light of Leapor's harrowing narratives of heterosexual attachment gone awry, as in “The Temple of Love,” and family feeling deformed by familial conflict, as in The Unhappy Father and The Cruel Parent, it is possible to read into this last wish a peculiar kind of vindication. If we are to take this speech as accurate reportage within the conventions of deathbed narratives, is there not something a little remarkable in Leapor's assuring her friend and patron that she has always loved her father, though never so much as now, when she is dying? And the work that he had tried to prevent will now, ironically, endow his old age, even afford him a comfortable subsistence: this work which was viewed as such unprofitable employment. We can imagine that Mr. Leapor wept at his daughter's death, and that her posthumously published poems might have given him some moments of uneasiness, if he read them.
Perhaps the cultural difficulty of this material is partly responsible for Leapor's reliance on the trope of the dream vision as a framing device. So often her poems begin with Mira drowsing, Mira falling into a trance from which she is eventually awakened at a moment of unrepresentable violence or other textual rapture:
Amid these Scenes beneath a Maple Shade,
Sat careless Mira on her Elbow laid,
While frolick Fancy led the usual Train
Of gaudy Phantoms through her cheated Brain:
Till Slumber seiz'd upon her thoughtful Breast,
And the still Spirits sunk in balmy Rest:
But while her Eyes had bid the World farewel,
Thus Mira dream'd, and thus her Dreams we tell;
A seeming Nymph, like those of Dian's Train,
Came swiftly tripping o'er the flow'ry Plain
(“The Moral Vision,” 7-16)
When lonely Night compos'd the drowsy Mind,
And hush'd the Bosom of the weary Hind,
Pleas'd with plain Nature and with simple Life,
I read the Scenes of Shore's deluded Wife,
Till my faint Spirits sought the silent Bed,
And on its Pillow drop'd my aking Head;
Then Fancy ever to her Mira kind,
Prepar'd her Phantoms for the roving Mind
(“The Temple of Love,” 1-8)
'Twas when the Sun had his swift Progress made,
And left his Empire to the Queen of Shade;
Bright Cynthia too, with her refulgent Train,
Shot their pale Lustre o'er the dewy Plain:
Sat lonely Mira with her Head reclin'd,
And mourn'd the Sorrows of her helpless Kind:
.....Till too much Thought the aking Heart oppress'd.
And Mira's Eye-lids clos'd in silent Rest:
Then active Fancy, with her airy Train,
Compos'd the Substance of the ensuing Dream.
(The Cruel Parent, 1-16)
These opening meditations are often followed by a sudden rude awakening, when the ensuing scene would be too violent or disturbing for graphic representation:
Then with pale Cheeks and with a ghastly Stare,
Peep'd o'er her Shoulder hollow-ey'd Despair;
Whose Hand extended bore a bleeding Heart,
And Death behind her shook his threat'ning Dart:
These Forms with Horror fill'd my aking Breast,
And from my Eye-lids drove the Balm of Rest:
I woke and found old Night her Course had run,
And left her Empire to the rising Sun;
(“The Temple of Love,” 85-92)
Lysegus, mourn thy Cruelty and Pride:
From the fair Court of Equity I came,
Call'd by thy Sins, and Conscience is my Name:
With Celia's Name I arm the dreadful Blow:
He said and struck—the visionary Dart
Sought the dark Bottom of Lysegus' Heart:
He fell—and falling rais'd a fearful Cry;
Then Mira 'woke, and found the Morning Sky.
(The Cruel Parent, 113-23)
Leapor's dream visions may remind us of Collier's meditations in bed, for they both situate their writing as emerging from their all-too-rare moments of leisure. Both seem to find in the meditation that borders on dream-work a necessary poetic license for their criticism of the dominant order. The border between waking consciousness and unconscious, traditionally “prophetic” revelation, serves them as a fertile territory for writing against the grain of ordinary experience and ideological assumption. The difference between Collier's and Leapor's use of the trope of the dream vision is also significant: Collier represents herself naturalistically as a tired worker, Leapor pastorally, her trances indicative of a writerly interest in the traditional rhyming of “mind” with a body “reclined,” and in the topos of the dream vision as such. Where Collier strains against poetic convention in order to make a strong empirical case, Leapor embraces the topos as a sign of the high literary tradition to which she wishes her work to be assimilated, in spite of its protofeminism and its wit at the expense of the fathers.
READING CRUMBLE-HALL
As should by now be clear, Leapor's is in no sense a one-poem œuvre. Although Mary Collier can be said to have written nothing so important or innovative again after The Woman's Labour, Mary Leapor's two volumes contain numerous poems of aesthetic interest and accomplishment. Nevertheless, there is a case to be made for her poem Crumble-Hall as a representative text whose literary-historical neglect has been unfortunate, if unsurprising. Crumble-Hall shows off Leapor's abilities as a comic and satiric writer on an ambitious scale; it represents a significant transformation of the genre of the country-house poem, so crucial in the fabrication and consequent reproduction of a propertied eighteenth-century political consensus; and it effectively condenses many of Leapor's characteristic textual maneuvers, from her strategic appropriation of poetical rhetoric recognizable as Pope's or Swift's or Gay's, to her foregrounding of class and gender as important textual determinants. Crumble-Hall is that rare artifact: a class-conscious plebeian country-house poem that undeniably mocks and seeks to demystify the values of the gentry, whose social power in large part depends upon the deference—and the continued exploitable subservience—of servants and laborers. Leapor's poem opens up long-closed doors and back stairways, lets light into the servants' hall, shakes things up in a literary genre that traditionally works by assuring us that the world is best organized according to ancient custom and ceremony. Pope had mocked particular country houses and their owners for failing to fulfill their pact with England's glorious agrarian past; Alastair Fowler cites earlier examples of this critical tendency in the genre.29 But both Pope and these earlier poets nevertheless seek to preserve the country-house ideal. Leapor leaves us wondering how a literary audience could have tolerated such evidently self-serving exaggeration for so long.
Traditionally, the country-house poem serves as a panegyric to its owners and their way of life. This is as true of its first instance as of its better-known later examples. Recent feminist scholarship has proposed that the English country-house poem was invented by a woman, Aemilia Lanyer, though male poets did not follow her line with it.30 As Raymond Williams has shown, the representation of a deceptively “natural” landscape and, less often, of a worked and working country, means a disposition of that prospect “according to a point of view,” the proprietary point of view: “If we ask, finally, who the genius of the place may be, we find that he is its owner, its proprietor, its improver” (Williams, p. 123). In The Description of Cooke-ham from Salve Devs Rex Ivdaeorvm,31 Lanyer thanks a female genius of the place, Margaret Clifford, Dowager Countess of Cumberland, “From whose desires did spring this worke of Grace” (12), for commissioning this poem and supporting the poet generously during its composition. The house itself is represented as enabling divine verse—“Where princely Palace will'd me to indite, / The sacred Storie of the Soules delight” (5-6), but most of the poem is devoted to the surrounding grounds and woods, instinct with the presence of Christ and his apostles, including Margaret Clifford herself, and her daughter Anne, Countess of Dorset. This combination of panegyric and devotional verse, with its emphasis on description of the country as a spiritualized green world in which women move freely rather than of the country house, sign of aristocratic honor and legitimation of aristocratic property, tends not to be pursued by later male country-house poets, but such a green world returns emphatically at the end of Crumble-Hall.
The flippant tone of much of Leapor's poem, however, marks her difference from Lanyer and from the genre as a whole (with the exception of Marvell's Upon Appleton House and particular moments in Pope's Epistle to Burlington) at least until Gray's “On Lord Holland's Seat” of 1768. Leapor's Crumble-Hall sets out at once to mock the pretensions to grandeur of a gentry class scarcely removed from their servants and laborers in terms of education and culture, and to mock the poetic sycophancy that would write Crumble-Hall as a traditional panegyric in spite of these incongruities. To some extent, Leapor's ironic stance as commentator on gentry pretensions prefigures Crabbe's in The Borough and in the posthumous tale, Silford Hall. In the former, the young attorney Swallow makes crude use of traditional hospitality to stimulate profitable litigation over disputed property, while in the latter, the poor schoolmaster's son, Peter Perkin, glimpses the romance of the great world when he is shown the genteel furnishings of Silford Hall—the happiest, most memorable event of his life:
How vast that Mansion, sure for monarch plann'd,
The rooms so many, and yet each so grand,—
Millions of books in one large hall were found,
And glorious pictures every room around;
He told of park and wood, of sun and shade,
And how the lake below the lawn was made:
He spake of feasting such as never boy,
Taught in his school, was fated to enjoy—
Of ladies' maids as ladies' selves who dress'd,
And her, his friend, distinguish'd from the rest,
By grandeur in her look, and state that she possess'd.
He pass'd not one; his grateful mind o'erflow'd
With sense of all he felt, and they bestow'd.(32)
(720-34)
Peter's inflated sense of the happiness made possible by wealth is undercut both by his own naiveté and the kind housekeeper's comments. Like Leapor, Crabbe represents the grandeur of the country house as subtly fractured from within by class antagonisms, but his narratorial perspective remains outside and his tone, unlike Leapor's, is distinctly moralizing rather than playful.
The opening of Crumble-Hall mockingly anatomizes the reverent traditionalism typical of the country-house poem. Crumble-Hall, we are told, has served as a repository of hospitality since Anglo-Saxon times; it has a noble past; no one has ever left it hungry. Inexorably, we are led to laugh at the sheer conventionality of country-house sentiment, designed to arouse feelings of loyalty throughout the social scale by means of the nostalgic projection of a past of shared wealth and plenty. This conventional summoning of a history of genteel largesse turns into a riot of comically conspicuous consumption that wastes resources in order to satisfy human greed:
That Crumble-Hall, whose hospitable Door
Has fed the Stranger, and reliev'd the Poor;
Whose Gothic Towers, and whose rusty Spires,
Were known of old to Knights, and hungry Squires.
There Powder'd Beef, and Warden-Pies, were found;
And Pudden dwelt within her spacious Bound:
Pork, Peas, and Bacon (good old English Fare!),
With tainted Ven'son, and with hunted Hare:
With humming Beer her Vats were wont to flow,
And ruddy Nectar in her Vaults to glow.
Here came the Wights, who battled for Renown,
The sable Frier, and the russet Clown:
The loaded Tables sent a sav'ry Gale,
And the brown Bowls were crown'd with simp'ring Ale;
While the Guests ravag'd on the smoking Store,
Till their stretch'd Girdles would contain no more.
Of this rude Palace might a Poet sing
From cold December to returning Spring.
(13-30)
Throughout the poem there is an ironical movement between the old tropes of country-house praise and less exalted disclosures: the venison is tainted, the vulnerable hare has been hunted to death to provide meat for this already groaning table, the guests gorge themselves until they are grossly bloated. Of such an establishment, the poet writes, it might be possible to sing for—at least three or four months, a bathetic deflation. But this seasonal specificity also implies that a poet might well try to seek shelter during these particularly inhospitable months by singing for supper at the gentry's table. There is something self-mocking about the very inevitability of the country-house poem in a culture in which poor poets are paid to praise their social oppressors. Thus we are alerted to the possibility of socially critical digs, jibes, and disclosures in Crumble-Hall.
Sometimes the limitations of a plebeian woman's education can be turned to good use, if what is generated is the very close—and critical—reading of a few inspiring texts. As with Mary Collier's intertextual relation to Duck, so also with Leapor's Popean intertextuality: the critical appropriation of a poem that seems to express some of the prejudices of the dominant culture can be radically productive. Leapor's imitation of Pope's style in the service of quite different values is particularly concentrated and effective in Crumble-Hall. She seizes upon the Epistle to Burlington, Pope's most sustained effort in the country-house mode, but goes beyond his criticism of landowning wastefulness and conspicuous consumption, for Pope confines himself to criticizing only the wealthiest and highest ranking landlords. The gentry, the middling sort, and the select few “good stewards” among the aristocracy, such as Pope's friends Burlington33 and Bathurst, are redeemed, and the country-house ideal upheld. Leapor, while echoing Pope and frequently reminding us of his satirical outbursts in To Burlington against such figures of excess as Timon, forces us to re-read Pope's poem through the lens of her own, and so to reread it in a different, more democratic and gender-conscious way. Whereas with Pope we must toil up Timon's monumental garden terraces to greet the host:
My Lord advances with majestic mien,
Smit with the mighty pleasure, to be seen:
But soft—by regular approach—not yet—
First thro' the length of yon hot Terrace sweat,
And when up ten steep slopes you've dragged your thighs,
Just at his Study-door he'll bless your Eyes(34)
(127-32)
with Leapor a sense of cramped quarters and inconvenient architecture predominates; the gentry and squirearchy appear to rule their parish and neighborhood without question, but theirs is a rule far removed from the opulence or national (perhaps prime-ministerial) significance of Timon's villa:
Shall we proceed?—Yes, if you'll break the Wall:
If not, return, and tread once more the Hall.
Up ten Stone Steps now please to drag your Toes,
And a brick Passage will succeed to those.
Here the strong Doors were aptly fram'd to hold
Sir Wary's Person, and Sir Wary's Gold.
(84-89)
Pope's condemnation of aristocratic self-display on a Timonesque scale may now seem a limited protest, perhaps even an instance of Barthesian inoculation: attack a particularly offensive example of an accepted general practice, and the whole socio-political structure is obscurely strengthened. From Mira's perspective, even Crumble-Hall is a show place, the local center of birth, wealth, and history—figured ironically in the bulky person and fortune of that shrewd self-preservationist, Sir Wary. And Crumble-Hall should rank, in Pope's terms, with those ludicrous buildings impossible to beautify according to the tenets of Burlington's Palladianism; it is, quite literally, Pope's “some patch'd dog-hole ek'd with ends of wall” (31), an unfashionable monument to the gentry's conservatism.35 For Mira, however, Crumble-Hall, be it ever so humble, represents the site of privilege and class exploitation.
This confrontation takes at least two forms: a critique of the gentry for failing to make use of their privileges in improving ways, and an exposure of the suppressed narratives of traditional high-literary country-house poetry—the servants' “quarter.” Pope rails against Timon as a Philistine who possesses an expensive library for the sake of its commodity value; he is a connoisseur of printers and bindings, not of the contents of books:
His Study! with what Authors is it stor'd?
In Books, not Authors, curious is my Lord;
To all their dated Backs he turns you round,
These Aldus printed, those Du Suëil has bound.
Lo some are Vellom, and the rest as good
For all his Lordship knows, but they are Wood.
For Locke or Milton 'tis in vain to look,
These shelves admit not any modern book.
(133-40)
If Pope's is the sneering protest of the contemporary author who will find no patron in this rich man, Leapor's exposure of philistinism has a more radical edge. The issue in Crumble-Hall is not fine bindings versus intellectual enlightenment, but the fact of books being possessed in the greatest quantity by those who have plenty of leisure, but who do not read them, when there are others too poor to own many books and without much time for study, who nevertheless cannot get enough to read. This is the burden of overworked Mira's commentary on Biron's library, in which he has the audacity to sleep. (Leapor, we should recall, possessed all of sixteen or seventeen volumes to which she could turn in her few moments of “unprofitable employment,” though at Weston Hall there was a substantial library to which it is likely she enjoyed some access.36)
Here Biron sleeps, with Books encircled round;
And him you'd guess a Student most profound.
Not so—in Form the dusty Volumes stand:
There's few that wear the Mark of Biron's Hand.
(90-93)
This vignette might pass as a not very caustic comment on genteel idleness if we were not immediately confronted in the poem with a reminder of Mira's situation within the text and within the social space of Crumble-Hall. Mira's “place” is not among these neglected books, despite the overt literary consciousness manifest in the poem “she” is producing. With the library, we have come to the end of civilization within the house and are now to be plunged into the servants' quarters, Mira's “proper” domain, however badly her fingers may itch to inscribe marginalia in Biron's unmarked volumes. Mira's proper sphere may not be quite the realm of “Old Shoes, and Sheep-ticks bred in Stacks of Wool; / Grey Dobbin's Gears, and Drenching-Horns enow; / Wheel-spokes—the Irons of a tatter'd Plough” (99-101)—the furnishings of plebeian georgics in the manner of Duck and Collier. But neither is she to venture freely into the beautiful prospect that can be only glimpsed from the cramped, airless rooms at the top of the house, so often disposed as servants quarters:
From hence the Muse precipitant is hurl'd,
And drags down Mira to the nether World.
(107-08)
Mira's proper sphere is the site of domestic production itself within the household, the network of kitchens, pantries, sculleries, outbuildings, cottages, and kitchen gardens that supply Crumble-Hall with produce and labor. The danger in this text is that Mira might get above herself, put on airs, show too much familiarity with the beauty of leisured prospects and the freedom of the countryside: write like a traditional country-house poet, in short. From that possibility, that treacherous attraction to the aestheticizing language of pastoral, Mira's “precipitant” muse is precipitously hurled. The “precipitant” muse is getting ahead of herself, acceeding to a pastoral freedom from which she is socially barred. The distinctive status of Crumble-Hall depends upon this exclusion, which necessitates a reversal in traditional generic procedure made explicit when Mira announces that she will represent for us the “menial Train” (110), the domestics and fieldworkers of the estate, before the gardens and groves: “Its Groves anon—its People first we sing” (111).
Crumble-Hall gives us forty-two lines of description of the lower orders that populate this “nether World,” yet the chief innovation and interest of Leapor's poem do not lie in her supplying, within this self-contained section, what other country-house poems have omitted. Rather, there is a diffusion of the servant's perspective throughout the text that this temporarily exclusive focus on the servants' quarters only encapsulates. The incongruous disclosures that undermine Crumble-Hall's pretensions to awesome gentility earlier in the poem include the spider spinning high above the hall, whose web is safe because it lies beyond the reach of any broom (46-47); the “timeless” heraldic device that needs to be refurbished once a year (48-51); the mice which run safely through passages so dark that no one can see them clearly (52-55); the refusal to elaborate descriptions of the shining china bowls and tapestry that decorate the parlor, when merely noting their existence will suffice (68-71); and the observation that the subject of an historical painting looks distinctly like a member of the lower orders herself—“And, like a Milk-wench, glares the royal Maid” (79). What connects these incongruous disclosures is the perspective from which they emerge: the perspective of the female servant, responsible for cleanliness, sheen, and decorative order in the household. If Timon's Villa were possessed of spiders, mice, and artifacts that required constant tending, a male guest like Pope would not be likely to remark upon them. And more elevated members of the household at Crumble-Hall would most likely dwell not on these “menial” but material questions of domestic maintenance but on the symbolic meaning of objects compelling to gentry families, such as heraldic insignia, with its genealogical significance, and the provenance of valuable collectables like china, wall-hangings, and oil paintings, features of the house to which Mira alludes but neglects to describe.
Mira's servant's-eye view of this establishment is particularized as a female servant's vantage-point in another way as well: in terms of a psycho-sexual dynamic that inflects the gender-specific division of labor. The entrance hall of Crumble-Hall features old and intricate wood carvings which lend a carnivalesque yet sinister air to the house's history and resonate disturbingly with Leapor's examination of patriarchal despotism in other texts. Her sparing use of the Augustan emphatic triplet, after Dryden, strikes strangely here, giving force to this image of a cruel history of gender and family relations so casually lived with as mere customary decoration:
Strange Forms above, present themselves to View;
Some Mouths that grin, some smile, and some that spew.
Here a soft Maid or Infant seems to cry:
Here stares a Tyrant, with distorted Eye:
The Roof—no Cyclops e'er could reach so high.
(39-43)
The text rushes breathlessly past this image of domestic tyranny, but there it is. And its significance is amplified by one of Leapor's most complex and problematical vignettes within her description of the house's “menial Train.”
Ursula and Roger—a mock-georgic couple, as Margaret Doody notes37—occupy twenty-six vividly satirical lines and so in some sense come to stand in for their employers, who seem relatively unrepresented in the text. Thus Leapor turns the tables on the traditional country-house strategy of celebrating ownership while suppressing labor by leaving it unrepresented. The owners of Crumble-Hall remain indistinctly drawn, but two servants lay out a lower-class version of the domestic drama which we might have expected from such gentry based on Leapor's treatment of upper-class domestic relations elsewhere in her œuvre. Indeed Leapor pushes the nonrepresentation of proprietorship so far that Ursula herself appears to have forgotten that she has employers, or that she labors for any master other than her husband Roger. If, with Ursula, we forget the country-house framework in which this passage is embedded, the character seems to be a satire on a prosperous cottager's wife who is a slave to romance, unlike Collier's cottagers living on the verge of poverty and hunger. Ironically, however, Ursula and Roger's prosperity implicitly depends on the country house whose owners Ursula's obsessive focus on her husband occludes. Like the owners of country houses as traditionally represented, Ursula concentrates all drama and ceremony within her immediate domestic situation, to the exclusion of its relations of production. Her putative employers are as tangential to her self-representation as she would be to theirs, if this were a conventional country-house poem. Thus an ironical equivalence is established between property and labor in the country-house domain; each is represented as excluding the other symbolically while remaining materially dependent upon it. Ursula is as trapped by a domestic ideology that foregrounds romance and marriage to the exclusion of other social relations, including her own servitude, as any middle-class mistress capable of forgetting the labor of the servants who make her domestic idyll possible.
Ursula's lament exposes, from the perspective of the laboring classes, the bankruptcy of romantic gender ideology and the wretchedness of a dependent female subjectivity constructed within marriage under the sign of the “helpmate.” While her exhausted husband Roger, “o'erstuff'd” with beef, cabbage, and dumplings, sleeps at the table and the dogs bark and howl, Ursula laments her fate until the kettle boils:
“Ah! Roger, Ah!” the mournful Maiden cries:
“Is wretched Urs'la then your Care no more,
“That, while I sigh, thus you can sleep and snore?
“Ingrateful Roger! wilt thou leave me now?
“For you these Furrows mark my fading Brow:
“For you my Pigs resign their Morning Due:
“My hungry Chickens lose their Meat for you:
“And, was it not, Ah! was it not for thee,
“No goodly Pottage would be dress'd by me.
“For thee these Hands wind up the whirling Jack,
“Or place the Spit across the sloping Rack.
“I baste the Mutton with a chearful Heart,
“Because I know my Roger will have Part.”
Thus she—But now her Dish-kettle began
To boil and blubber with the foaming Bran.
The greasy Apron round her Hips she ties,
And to each Plate the scalding Clout applies:
The purging Bath each glowing Dish refines,
And once again the polish'd Pewter shines.
(137-55)
Ursula gives voice to an important ideological problematic whose resonances persist well into our own historical moment: the question of the “bourgeoisification” of working-class ideas about sexuality, marriage, and the family. For Ursula, domestic labor and household production have ceased to have any meaning apart from the expression of marital devotion they supposedly signify. Unlike Collier's wives, Ursula does not “work,” she “sighs” while her husband sleeps, wishing he would wake up and show her some affection. At an historical moment when landed middle-class women were beginning to withdraw from production within the household economy and leaving even domestic tasks increasingly to the care of servants, when farmer's wives were beginning not to manage their stock or their dairies themselves, but to hire dairymaids, and when leisured domesticity itself was beginning to be seen as a sufficient occupation for women who could afford it, Ursula reproduces this identification with leisured domesticity at an ideological level. She thereby trivializes her work—keeping livestock, gardening, cooking, washing-up, housekeeping—by transforming these activities into mere epiphenomena of wifely devotion. The whole structure of employers and servants falls away, leaving only the heterosexual couple. One would think that the gargantuan meals Ursula prepares were destined for Roger's table alone, rather than for the gentry at Crumble-Hall, until the last line of her lament: “Because I know my Roger will have Part.” In a household economy in which Ursula, and not her mistress, is primarily in charge of the cooking, it is possible for her to ensure that her husband will have “part” of every dish, if only after “the quality” have eaten their fill. Obsessively, Ursula invests in a conjugal romance in which Roger's labor, or his dinner, leaves him apparently too exhausted to participate. The life of physical labor minimizes the deployment of affective energies within the household, according to this satiric scheme; emotional work becomes another form of women's work, radically separated from public activity and confined within the household, only to be devalued there as “mere” domesticity, not something in which working men can be expected to engage.
Whether this domestic dysfunction is meant to be seen as confined to the workers at Crumble-Hall cannot be decided; Leapor's class-specific focus gives us the domestic drama of Ursula and Roger rather than the drama of the house's owners. This is the burden of Leapor's plebeian transformation of the country-house poem. For the gentry's marital difficulties, that more familiar tale, we have numerous other sources for citation in Leapor's work, especially The Mistaken Lover. There is thus no reason to assume that Leapor endorses the ideology of romantic-love-in-marriage as unproblematical for upper-class women, while satirizing only its peculiar inappropriateness for women of the laboring classes. The laboring situation of Ursula and Roger does, however, render the contradictions of romantic ideology, and its powerfully imaginary status as ideology, particularly obvious.
The disjunction between Ursula's romantic expectations and the circumstances in which she finds herself as a working man's wife and domestic laborer also dramatizes at a strikingly early historical moment what Michèle Barrett, following Mark Poster, characterizes as “a struggle between the familial ideology of the emergent bourgeoisie and the practices of other classes.”38 Barrett acknowledges Poster's argument that “the bourgeois conception of the family has become dominant—that, in fact, the imposition of the bourgeois family onto the working class is ‘one of the unwritten aspects of the political success of bourgeois democracy’” (Barrett, pp. 203-04; Poster, p. 196), but she maintains a useful distinction between familial ideology and actual working-class practices that Leapor's poem also articulates:
At an ideological level the bourgeoisie has certainly secured a hegemonic definition of family life: as ‘naturally’ based on close kinship, as properly organized through a male breadwinner with financially dependent wife and children, and as a haven of privacy beyond the public realm of commerce and industry. To a large extent this familial ideology has been accepted by the industrial working class and indeed has proved effective as motivation for male wage labour and the male ‘family’-wage demand. Yet there is a disjunction between the pervasiveness of this ideology (from about the mid-nineteenth century onwards) and the actual household structure of the proletariat in which it exists. Few working-class households have historically been organized around dependence on a male ‘breadwinning’ wage and the earnings of other family members have usually been essential to maintain the household. … Families are enmeshed in and responsive to the ideology of ‘the family’ as well as engaged in reproducing it. … The point I am emphasizing here is that we can make a distinction between the construction of gender within families, and the social construction of gender within an ideology of familialism, and we can conclude that the latter formulation is the more accurate one.
(Barrett, pp. 204-06)
Thus a good half century before industrialization makes possible the new “industrial working class,” and some decades before the American and French revolutions, we find inscribed in Leapor's text the preconditions for the eventual dominance of bourgeois familial ideology. Frustrated romantic wife and exhausted, perhaps indifferent, husband who loves his creature comforts: the agrarian servants and laborers Ursula and Roger represent the soon-to-be hegemonic contradictions of gender ideology fundamental to the bourgeois family, especially the particular construction of female subjectivity effected by this cultural production. The fact that they seem to be a childless couple might then be read as accentuating the power of familial ideology to interpellate individual subjects at the deepest level of unconscious self-identification, regardless of their “real” circumstances.
These satirical characters may constitute a complex form of ideology critique, but they also exemplify Leapor's skill at appropriating high literary modes of representation. Ursula is drawn as sharply as any of Swift's or Pope's characters, and the last six lines of the passage, her kitchen rites, can stand with Pope's brilliantly squalid mock-epic games in Book ii of the Dunciad as a parody of Augustan periphrasis in the service of “menial” contemporary materials. Most suggestively, these lines closely follow the last six lines of Gay's “Thursday: Or, The Spell” which stand as an epigraph to this book's introduction. But where Gay gives us Hobnelia's swoon at Lubberkin's return as farce, the gratification of her desire through Lubberkin's willingness to “give her a green gown,” to make their liaison public through pregnancy, as low comedy, Leapor represents the consequences of such romantic enthrallment as both bathetic and pathetic. The mock-heroic mode of Ursula's kitchen rites seems meant to restore us to comic stability after the absurd but painfully self-righteous masochism of her lament.
Leapor's satire thus spares neither her own class nor women as complicit with their own oppression. Is it not possible, however, that Leapor's satire here succeeds too well in displacing “responsibility” or agency for ideological interpellation onto these lower-class characters, so that the containers of ideology become the object of satire, and not the ideology itself? Or, to put it another way, does she not end up recycling traditional classist and misogynistic conventions of representation as part of her satiric apparatus? At what point does Leapor's satire cease to be critical of ideology and help perpetuate instead the very stereotypes of class- and gender-specific subjectivity that her texts also work to destabilize or render untenable? If we had some evidence of contemporary critical reception of this poem, such a determination might be easier, but the evidence is not forthcoming. I would suggest that the narrative, or rather the ideological, excess generated by Ursula's lament, in the context of Crumble-Hall as an anti-country-house poem, prevents any easy recuperation of this character in the service of such ideological consolidation. We would have to read Ursula and Roger entirely outside the contexts of the poem and Leapor's œuvre to conclude “Servants are just like that!” or “Isn't that just like a woman!” or “How silly of the lower classes to behave in such a way!” To read the vignette out of context might be to construct such a conservatively recuperative reading, but we should remember the country-house conventions in which Ursula and Roger are embedded. As with the proprieties and proprietors of Crumble-Hall, so with its servants, who are neither outside ideology nor uncontaminated by the country-house ethos. If we also keep both class and gender in play as possible textual determinants, and refuse to read the passage outside the larger “text” of Leapor's literary production—the whole apparatus of her self-representation and her patronized presentation to the public—then the evidence for her typically critical stance and frequently demystificatory procedures may encourage us to resist a recuperative reading.
Leapor's demystification of the country household as social institution and as literary trope does not end with her satire on gender ideology, however. The poem concludes with a long-deferred escape into those pastoral groves surrounding Crumble-Hall—a briefly glimpsed alternative, even utopian, domain of leisure and freedom. But even here the landscape exists primarily as a site of conflict; the country house can no longer serve as a locus of social harmony or of harmony between human interests and a more complex ecology. The green world of the grove is no sooner escaped into than it is rent by shrieks, for like so many landlords bent on the “improvement” of an estate, Crumble-Hall's owners are felling their timber, in this case for the minor ostentation of a new parlor.39
But, hark! what Scream the wond'ring Ear invades!
The Dryads howling for their threaten'd Shades:
Round the dear Grove each Nymph distracted flies
(Tho' not discover'd but with Poet's Eyes):
And shall those Shades, where Philomela's Strain
Has oft to Slumber lull'd the hapless Swain;
Where Turtles us'd to clasp their silken Wings;
Whose rev'rend Oaks have known a hundred Springs;
Shall these ignobly from their Roots be torn,
And perish shameful, as the abject Thorn;
While the slow Carr bears off their aged Limbs,
To clear the way for Slopes, and modern Whims;
Where banish'd Nature leaves a barren Gloom,
And aukward Art supplies the vacant Room?
Yet (or the Muse for Vengeance calls in vain)
The injur'd Nymphs shall haunt the ravag'd Plain:
Strange Sounds and Forms shall teaze the gloomy Green;
And Fairy-Elves by Urs'la shall be seen:
Their new-built Parlour shall with Echoes ring:
And in their Hall shall doleful Crickets sing.
(165-84)
Here Leapor's appropriation of neoclassical tropes with a sapphic tendency takes on new significance in the advocacy of a “green” politics of ecological conservation. The female pastoral idyll that offers at least a partial alternative to the miseries and confinement of marriage is enabled by the very wildness of the forest, as opposed to the worked garden or field. And the forest accommodates the exhausted swain as well; it represents not so much a separatist idyll as a realm of general liberty, of release from social constraints and relief from social oppression. With an intertextual flourish, Leapor reverses the praise that Pope had offered Burlington for his use of the forest in the service of building, commerce, and imperial exploits; for Pope, those who follow Burlington's example as improving stewards of their land are those:
Whose rising Forests, not for pride or show,
But future Buildings, future Navies grow:
Let his plantations stretch from down to down,
First shade a Country, and then raise a Town.
(187-90)
But for Leapor the grove represents the only site of social ventilation on the estate and should not be sacrificed for mere aggrandizement of the country house. “Improvement” and “progress” are thus subjected to ironical scrutiny at the same time that a more natural economy than the present, “improving” one and an ecological consciousness are recommended. Crumble-Hall is a country-house poem that advocates the containment, not the expansion, of the country house: its radical removal from the scene may be as yet unthinkable but its demystification is complete.
Of the plebeian female poets of the period, Mary Leapor possesses the most writerly œuvre. Hers is also the body of work most easily assimilable to what we commonly describe today as “radical feminism,” with its polemics against patriarchy, male violence, and heterosexist containments of economies of desire. Paradoxically, then, Leapor represents some of the most easily recuperable and some of the most difficult and unexpected possibilities of emergent eighteenth-century feminism. Leapor's contemporary readers would appear not to have read her as radically as some feminist readers may now wish to do. What most delights the traditional literary critic may well prevent him from recognizing what feminist readers might be most interested to discover. That Mary Leapor, a gardener's daughter and a domestic servant, should have had her work published at all, even posthumously, may still seem to us in the late twentieth century little short of miraculous. That too tells us something about the appeal of the unlikely, the curious, the peculiarly marginal, in this period of expanding literary markets. Perhaps Leapor's relative subordination of issues of class consciousness to issues of gender oppression will prove the most easily assimilable aspect of her work; it is also, I would argue, in the U.S. context at least, the least radical, in the strict sense of constituting an uprooting of fixed assumptions, of what is historically and structurally, though differently constituted in different times and places, always already there.
Notes
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Poems, Upon Several Occasions. By Mrs. Leapor of Brackley in Northamptonshire, 2 vols. (London: J. Roberts, 1748-51). We should note that James Roberts, the publisher and bookseller, had also handled Duck's and Collier's work. The “Rever. Mr. Stephen Duck” is listed as a subscriber to Leapor's first volume. Readers of Leapor are all indebted to the groundbreaking research of Betty Rizzo, particularly her work on the patronage and publication history of Leapor's texts. In “Christopher Smart, the ‘C. S.’ Poems, and Molly Leapor's Epitaph,” The Library, sixth series, 5 (March 1983), pp. 22-31 and in her entry on Leapor in Todd (ed.), A Dictionary, pp. 192-93, Rizzo establishes that Samuel Richardson printed the second volume, edited by Isaac Hawkins Browne, and that Leapor's chief patron, the writer of the letter of February 21, 1749 to John *****, Esq. in Leapor's second volume, the document from which most biographical information about Leapor has been derived, is Bridget Freemantle. In “Molly Leapor: An Anxiety for Influence,” The Age of Johnson: A Scholarly Annual 4, ed. Paul J. Korshin (New York: AMS Press, forthcoming, 1991), Rizzo makes a strong case for John Watts having printed the first volume, pp. 14-15. My thanks to her for having generously shared valuable unpublished research.
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Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine 41:257 (March 1837), p. 408.
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I am indebted to Richard Greene for these biographical facts about Leapor; his fund of knowledge and good judgment, and his generous sharing of unpublished work, have saved me from a number of errors. He discovered the existence of the inscribed copy of Leapor's first volume at Weston Hall—the library contains both volumes—and represents her biography most fully in relation to criticism of the poems in his unpublished D.Phil. thesis, “Mary Leapor: A Problem of Literary History,” Oxford University, 1989.
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The Cruel Parent. A Dream is a poem in Leapor's first volume; The Unhappy Father. A Tragedy, the work of which she was most proud, is a play in her second.
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For an introduction to some of the theoretical problems posed by such an inquiry, see Monique Wittig, “The Straight Mind,” Feminist Issues 1:1 (Summer 1980), pp. 103-11; the “Lesbian Issue” of Signs 9:4 (Summer 1984); Katie King, “The Situation of Lesbianism as Feminism's Magical Sign: Contests for Meaning and the U.S. Women's Movement, 1968-1972,” Communication 9 (1986), pp. 65-91; and Biddy Martin, “Lesbian Identity and Autobiographical Difference[s],” in Life/Lines: Theorizing Women's Autobiography, ed. Bella Brodzki and Celeste Schenck (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1989), pp. 77-103. I am especially indebted to Elaine Hobby, whose unpublished paper, “Writing and Deviance in Early-Modern England: Katherine Philips—Was She, Or Wasn't She? And Why Does It Matter?,” delivered at the University of Sussex in the spring of 1986, has helped me to place some of these difficulties in a theoretically nuanced historical context.
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Hobby, with reference to a recent formulation by Jonathan Dollimore, “Writing and Deviance in Early-Modern England,” p. 7.
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See in the second volume of her poems the letter of February 21, 1749 from Leapor's anonymous female patron, Bridget Freemantle, to John *****, Esq., p. xxxii. At one point in her letter, Freemantle addresses this John *****, Esq. as if he were instrumental in printing Leapor's verse: “… when the Papers were first sent to you, in order to be printed,” p. xxv. There are no fewer than fifteen John———, Esq.'s among the subscribers to Leapor's first volume, and eight in the list for volume ii, including one John Wowen, Esq. (five asterisks, five letters?) who subscribed for four copies of the latter, as many as Samuel Richardson, and Isaac Hawkins Browne and his wife between them, did—and Richardson and Hawkins Browne were involved in bringing out this second volume. Four copies of the second volume were as many as were bought by anybody except the Rev. Dr. Trimnell, Archdeacon of Leicester, who bought six. Betty Rizzo thinks that John *****, Esq. is John Duncombe: “Molly Leapor: An Anxiety for Influence,” p. 16; Richard Greene thinks he is possibly John Blencowe, of the family for whom both Leapor and her father had worked.
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The recovery of Sappho for twentieth-century feminists includes such work as Joan DeJean's “Fictions of Sappho,” Critical Inquiry 13 (Summer 1987), pp. 787-805, Linda S. Kauffman, Discourses of Desire: Gender, Genre, and Epistolary Fictions (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1986), esp. pp. 50-61, J. Hallett, “Sappho and Her Social Context: Sense and Sensuality,” Signs 4 (1979), pp. 447-64, Eva Stehle Stigers's response, pp. 465-71, and Lawrence Lipking, Abandoned Women and Poetic Tradition (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1988).
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See, for example, Nicolas Boileau-Despréaux, Œuvres Diverses Du Sieur D*** Avec Le Traité Du Sublime … (Paris: Denys Thierry, 1685); Posthumous Works of Monsieur Boileau. Made English by Several Hands (London: E. Curll, 1713); Ambrose Phillips's translations of Sappho's odes, with a life, in The Works of Anacreon, And Sappho. Done from the Greek, by several Hands (London: E. Curll, 1713); and Joseph Addison's The Works of Anacreon, Translated Into English Verse; … To which are added the Odes, Fragments, and Epigrams of Sappho (London: John Watts, 1735); it is interesting that Watts published Sappho and printed Leapor's first volume. Longinus quotes an ode of Sappho's in order to illustrate the potentially sublime representation of eros as engaging not merely one “passion,” but all the passions and all the senses—a description of erotic feeling endorsed by Longinus as what “any lover undergoes.” Some translators make more of Sappho's addressing this ode to a woman than others; Ambrose Phillips's “normalizing” headnote reads: “Whatever might have been the Occasion of this Ode, the English Reader will enter into the Beauties of it, if he supposes it to have been written in the Person of a Lover sitting by his Mistress,” p. 74.
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Joseph Addison, Spectator no. 223, Thursday, November 15, 1711 in The Spectator, ed. Donald F. Bond, 5 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1965), ii, p. 366.
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See Lipking, Abandoned Women and Poetic Tradition, p. 255 for other contenders; Lipking himself favors Aphra Behn, p. 97.
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On Leapor's debt to Swift, see Margaret Doody, “Swift among the Women,” pp. 79-82.
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“To the Reader,” in the first volume of Leapor's poems, Sig. a2v.
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In the biographical chapter of “Mary Leapor,” Richard Greene suggests that such poems as “The Disappointment,” An Essay on Friendship, “The Head-Ach. To Aurelia,” and others indicate that Leapor at some point belonged to a circle of young women, possibly while she was in service at Weston Hall since her father seems not to have known about them, but Greene also presents a few arguments against this supposition: “The Sacrifice” and An Epistle to Artemisia. On Fame suggest that she entertained friends at home; Philip Leapor simply may not have observed his daughter's friendships closely; and Leapor's work in the Jennens's house would have left little time for socializing, especially if she was using her leisure to write, pp. 16-17.
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Greene, “Mary Leapor,” p. 19.
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Bridget Freemantle was the second daughter of Thomas Freemantle, rector of Hinton from 1692 until his death in 1719, and Mary Freemantle, daughter of John Newton, Gent. She and her mother lived together in Hinton, a small village “in a low situation about one mile east from Brackley” until her mother's death some months before Leapor's in 1746. Bridget Freemantle lived on at Hinton until her death in her eighty-first year in 1779. See George Baker, The History and Antiquities of the County of Northampton, 2 vols. (London: Nichols, 1822-30), i, pp. 635-38. My thanks to Betty Rizzo for this reference.
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Greene, “Mary Leapor,” p. 17.
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Letter [from Freemantle] to John *****, Esq., pp. xx-xxii.
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Hecht, The Domestic Servant Class in Eighteenth-Century England, p. 115. My thanks to Richard Greene for this reference.
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Letter from Leapor [to Freemantle], ii, p. 314.
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D.N.B., xi, p. 766.
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See Betty Rizzo, “Christopher Smart, the ‘C.S.’ Poems, and Molly Leapor's Epitaph,” pp. 22-31 and “Molly Leapor: An Anxiety for Influence,” pp. 13-19; D.N.B., xi, p. 766. The evidence for Samuel Richardson, Isaac Hawkins Browne, and Christopher Smart as involved in the production and promotion of volume ii—Smart largely through a projected epitaph—and for the identification of Bridget Freemantle as the author of the letter to John *****, Esq. is in a letter from Richardson to Isaac Hawkins Browne, December 10, 1750, in the Hyde Collection, Four Oaks Farm, Somerville, New Jersey.
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“Th' autumnal threads that round the branches flew” is a slight alteration of “Colinetta,” line 11; Gentleman's Magazine 54:ii (September 1784), p. 650. This quotation touches off a discussion in subsequent issues regarding Leapor's identity; we cannot assume that she was widely known, but her reputation lived on.
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William Cowper, letter of March 19, 1791 in William Hayley, The Life and Posthumous Writings of William Cowper, Esqr., 4 vols. (Chichester: J. Seagrave for J. Johnson, London, 1806), iii, p. 296. This letter favorably compares Elizabeth Bentley's “natural genius” with Leapor's.
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Letter [from Freemantle] to John *****, Esq., ii, pp. xxix-xxx.
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Pope, Satire II. i., ed. John Butt, T.E., iv: “F. I'd write no more. P. Not write? but then I think, / And for my Soul I cannot sleep a wink” (11-12).
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Letter from Leapor [to Freemantle], ii, p. 317.
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Letter [from Freemantle] to John *****, Esq., ii, p. xxviii.
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Alastair Fowler, “Country House Poems: The Politics of a Genre,” The Seventeenth Century 1:1 (1986), pp. 1-14.
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See The Feminist Companion to Literature in English and the forthcoming anthology from the Brown University Women Writers Project under the direction of Susanne Woods and Elaine Brennan, Women Writers in English 1330-1830. Lanyer does not appear in such otherwise indispensable studies of the genre as George R. Hibbard's “The Country-house Poem of the Seventeenth Century,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 19 (1956), pp. 159-74 and Raymond Williams's The Country and the City. See, for a critique of Williams and other marxist writers on the genre, Fowler, “Country House Poems.” See also Heather Dubrow, “The Country-House Poem: A Study in Generic Development,” Genre 12 (Summer 1979), pp. 153-79 and, in relation to Pope, Howard Erskine-Hill, The Social Milieu of Alexander Pope: Lives, Example, and the Poetic Response (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1975), esp. pp. 279-317.
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Aemilia Lanyer, The Description of Cooke-ham from Salve Devs Rex Ivdaeorvm (London: Printed by Valentine Simmes for Richard Bonian, 1611), Sig. h2r-11r.
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George Crabbe, Letter VI. Professions—Law in The Borough, ed. Norma Dalrymple-Champneys and Arthur Pollard, The Complete Poetical Works, 3 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1988), i, pp. 419-21 and Silford Hall; or, The Happy Day in Posthumous Tales, The Complete Poetical Works, iii, p. 24.
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For the historical distortions involved in this view of Burlington, see Carole Fabricant, Swift's Landscape (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982), pp. 109-13.
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Pope, The Epistle to Burlington in T.E., iii:ii.
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The description of the rooms at Weston by Sir George Sitwell in A Brief History of Weston Hall Northamptonshire and of the Families That Possessed It (London: privately printed, 1927) suggests that Weston Hall may well have been Leapor's model for the house, but what Leapor satirizes, Sitwell cites as evidence “that some good architect was the designer,” p. 13: “At the south-east corner of the house the ground falls away sharply, thus enabling kitchen and offices to be placed in a basement well lighted from the east. From the kitchen wing, a service passage at the same level led under the small paved court in front of the hall, emerging by a stairway through what is now a china cupboard close to the parlour and drawing-room. The windows, half-sunk in the ground, which light the passage, are of the 1680-90 type, and the order in which ‘small beer cellar, bottle house, cellar stair door, folding doors by parlour,’ follow each other in the list of 1714, indicate that this was the original planning of the house.” My thanks to Richard Greene for bringing this book to my attention.
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Greene, “Mary Leapor,” p. 13.
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Margaret Doody, “Swift among the Women,” p. 82.
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See Michèle Barrett, Women's Oppression Today, p. 202, and Mark Poster, Critical Theory of the Family (London: Pluto, 1978).
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Great alterations that sound remarkably reminiscent of Leapor's parlor-building here were made at Weston, though not until 1777, according to Sitwell: “These alterations of 1777 made the house more commodious, but ruined its beauty. A lofty Drawing- or Dining room was gained, with three airy bedchambers of the new fashion. On the other hand, the Great Parlour disappeared, the ceiling in this part being lowered to gain height for the storey above, while the hall was deprived of afternoon sun and of its view over the flower-garden,” A Brief History, p. 72.
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A Northamptonshire Poetess: Glimpses of an Eighteenth-Century Prodigy
Molly Leapor: An Anxiety for Influence
