SOURCE: Greene, Richard. “Problems of the Woman Poet,” and “Primitivism and Education.” In Mary Leapor: A Study in Eighteenth-Century Women's Poetry, pp. 38-97; 157-85. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993.

[In the first excerpt which follows, Greene analyzes Leapor's attitudes towards issues of gender and domesticity, female friendship, and standards of feminine beauty. In the second excerpt, Greene examines Leapor's poetry in the context of the vogue for the works of “natural poets” during her time.]

PROBLEMS OF THE WOMAN POET

The poet was a member of polite society addressing himself to his equals, and though poetry was a special mode of communication it did not exempt him from all the normal usages of polite society. If you invited him to make one at a dinner-party, you expected him to talk intelligibly; if he published a volume of poems you expected him to write the sort of thing that the average well-educated man could understand because it came within the orbit of his own experience. If he had (as we all have) some purely private thoughts and feelings and relationships and experiences, you expected him to keep those to himself, and not embarrass your dinner-party with them, or even bring them into his poems.¹

James Sutherland's description of eighteenth-century poetry as a dinner-party to which only men are invited may be justified in relation to the traditional canon of polite verse. This gathering, above all, does not wish to be disturbed or embarrassed or confused. Yet one may imagine that the dinner-party takes place in a large house, and that in another room the ladies are engaged in their own conversations. One woman, the wife of the host, is giving instructions to the upper servants. She may feel, like the Countess of Winchilsea, that her gifts are not valued: ‘… the dull mannage, of a servile house ❙ Is held by some, our outmost art, and use.’² She may think herself wasted in a world where good help is hard to find. On the night of the dinner-party, it seems, the kitchen-maid has allowed the meat to scorch.

That women writers all suffered the same disadvantages, entertained approximately the same ambitions, and approached their writing out of basically the same experiences, is manifestly untrue. While many concerns are shared, their lives are often as different as those of the Countess of Winchilsea and the kitchen maid from Brackley. Although most scholars are aware of this problem with respect to women's writing, some prefer simpler terms. The editors of Kissing the Rod: An Anthology of Seventeenth-Century Women's Verse choose a military metaphor to describe the activity of women poets in their period: ‘We have aimed to show who the women were who tried to storm the highest bastion of the cultural establishment, the citadel of “sacred poetry”. They were all guerilleras, untrained, ill-equipped, isolated and vulnerable.’³ Given the number of titled ladies in the volume, it is hard to believe that their struggles were absolutely equivalent to that of, say, Aphra Behn, who at the end of her life was brought to desperate circumstances. Ann Messenger describes the condition of women writers in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in very different terms:

no single critical or historical label fits. There were isolated, confessional, misunderstood, suffering women writers, and there were successful amateurs and professionals, welcomed and supported as part of the community. There were fighters and rebels who were writers, and there were contented wives, mothers, and Sunday school teachers who were writers. There was a sense of sisterhood, of a women's literary tradition, and there was overt rejection of the idea. The only truly valid generalization that can be drawn is that no truly valid generalization is possible.⁴

Messenger is not, of course, suggesting that women's writing in the period is so fragmented that the concept is basically useless, but that the writing of women cannot be reduced to a single critical proposition.

Some critics of women's writing in the eighteenth century approach their material with a narrowly ideological set of criteria. In a paper awarded a prize by the women's caucus of the MLA, Beth Kowaleski-Wallace writes: ‘Eighteenth-century literary biography reiterates the preoccupation with the benevolent patriarch by providing examples of men-centered women, “daddy's girls”, among them Elizabeth Carter, Hannah More, Maria Edgeworth, and Fanny Burney.’⁵ It is hard to imagine that a term like ‘daddy's girls’ can be applied with fairness, let alone exactitude. While it is certainly necessary to chart shifts in women's position in literature and society through history, it is crudely ahistorical to judge writers of the past exclusively through terms arrived at in the late twentieth century. Jessica Munns asks an important question in a generally sympathetic review of Jacqueline Pearson's The Prostituted Muse: Images of Women and Women Dramatists 1642-1737: ‘What are modern feminists, busily undoing gender systems, doing setting up systematics of feminism and then, as it were, awarding or withholding Brownie points for their fulfilment or omission?’⁶ To treat women of the eighteenth century narrowly as pioneers or precursors of modern feminism has the unfortunate effect of visiting a new teleology on eighteenth-century studies. Whereas the view of mid-century literature as pre-Romantic was effectively demolished by Northrop Frye,⁷ there is a danger now of regarding women writers as pilgrims on the way to modern feminism, or at least to some recognizable place in the history of women's writing. The essential point is not that a feminist reading of the eighteenth century is impossible, but that it must, as Munns suggests, recognize not only sexual difference but the difference between one century and another.⁸

The crucial historical issue in relation to women writers of the eighteenth century is marriage. Lawrence Stone has put forward a highly influential argument that the eighteenth century saw the rise of the companionate marriage, and that affection between husband and wife was for the first time widely judged as important as economic considerations.⁹ This argument has been challenged in relation to all classes by historians examining various kinds of evidence from the seventeenth century and earlier.¹⁰ The belief that affection as an ideal of marriage was basically invented by the middle and upper classes in the eighteenth century has, however, led some critics into simplistic views. Eva Figes, for example, bases her interpretation of women's writing until 1850 on the belief that ‘Until the eighteenth century marriage, like life, tended to be brutish and short’.¹¹ Katherine Rogers, though a well-informed critic, is likewise misled on this point. She believes that the sudden growth in women's writing and the interest in issues relating to women was largely owing to the rise of the companionate marriage. The first sentence of Feminism in Eighteenth-Century England makes her position clear: ‘A significant new interest in woman's nature and position, caused in part by a radical change in attitudes toward marriage, appears in eighteenth-century literature.’¹² Women did find a new means of articulating their experiences by publishing, yet it is a mistake to believe that the huge growth in women's writing went hand in hand with equally momentous shifts in attitudes towards marriage.¹³

Given that the ideal of the companionate marriage had existed before the eighteenth century, it must be recognized that women's position within marriage was inferior to that of men. At marriage a woman's legal identity was submerged in that of her husband. A married woman's position before the law was approximately that of a child or an incompetent. The husband had coercive powers to govern most aspects of a woman's life, particularly through his control of money. Although they had certain rights, especially under equity law, few women were willing to go to court against their husbands.¹⁴ At lower levels of society the forms of marriage tended to be more relaxed. Common-law marriage or simple espousal allowed women to retain financial independence.¹⁵ By definition, of course, women at the lower levels of society would have had fewer assets to control.

Within marriage a wife was generally expected to obey her husband. The biblical teaching on this was unambiguous: Genesis 3: 16 and Galatians 5: 22-3 as well as other passages firmly established the husband as the dominant partner. Biblical authority was very difficult to resist, and presented particular problems to orthodox moralists who were also aware of the dangers of domestic tyranny. Samuel Johnson treads carefully in one of his sermons, affirming the woman's duty of obedience while arguing strongly that a husband's authority also has its limits: ‘But though obedience may be justly required, servility is not to be exacted; and though it may be lawful to exert authority, it must be remembered, that to govern and to tyrannize are very different, and that oppression will naturally provoke rebellion’ (Johnson, xiv. 14). Basic affection and normal standards of decency often allowed balanced relationships to evolve. Some husbands, however, would feel no hesitation in exacting the obedience decreed by scripture, even by the domestic chastisement permitted under law. The potential for oppression was enormous. Bridget Hill maintains that wife-beating was common through all levels of society, though it was rather better concealed among the affluent (Hill, 199-200).

Moral standards imposed a further and more subtle restriction on women. Whereas standards of ethical behaviour for men were essentially active, a woman was obliged above all to remain chaste. According to Katherine Rogers, a zealous defence of sexual reputation entailed a negative moral standard: virtue consisted in what was not done. In order to preserve her reputation, a woman was obliged to refrain from most types of work that might bring financial independence. As one rose in society this problem, paradoxically, became more acute as the possibilities of domestic service or involvement in a family enterprise were reduced.¹⁶ Although writing remained an outlet for women's talents, many women who published were attacked as whores. Early in the century especially, there was the real danger of being compared with Aphra Behn or Delarivière Manley or other writers whose sexual conduct had caused scandal. There had been women writers of the Restoration whose reputations were unassailable, notably Katherine Phillips, but to publish was indeed a risk. By the second quarter of the century there were more examples of women writers whose morality was unimpeachable, including Elizabeth Rowe and Elizabeth Carter. Yet there were also instances of women writers falling into disgrace, most famously Laetitia Pilkington, a protégée of Jonathan Swift. The opprobrium that went with sexual scandal was usually difficult to bear. Catherine Jemmat in her ‘Essay in Vindication of the Female Sex’ (1766) described her own ‘ruin’:

The villain who was the occasion of my ruin and disgrace, and has imparted the self-same treatment on many others of my sex, is considered by the world as a man of unspotted honour. The public may be assured that he has been very frequently engaged in what is gently termed gallantry and intrigue; but yet these (give me leave to call them capital crimes) are not in the least considered in him as deserving of censure.¹⁷

Jemmat's frank protest against a double standard is certainly unusual. It shows nonetheless that, in matters of scandal, women had everything to lose, and men almost nothing. Women writers were expected to remain within strict bounds of modesty. It was normal for women to write about love, but they were expected always to be decorous. It was acceptable for Alexander Pope to describe female desire in ‘Eloisa to Abelard’, but no woman might approach the subject without considerable danger to her reputation.

An adult woman was normally expected to be a wife and mother. Yet in the first half of the century the number of unmarried women increased substantially, so that they formed a significant minority group.¹⁸ Spinsters maintained an anomalous social position and were often seen as a threat to a society that assumed all women would marry and be subject to the control of their husbands (Hill, 229-30). Spinsters and widows enjoyed the legal status of femme sole in which they had control of their own affairs. Where a woman could expect a jointure, the death of a husband had distinct benefits, yet a woman who had lost a husband, or failed to get one at all, might find herself in genuine distress. Olwen Hufton observes that outside domestic service single working women had difficulty surviving on their wages. One common solution to this was ‘spinster clustering’, that is, single women sharing accommodation and expenses. An alternative was for a widowed mother and unmarried daughter to maintain a household, as, indeed, Bridget Freemantle did with her mother. Many women would assume control of the family business upon the death of a spouse. Widows were numerous, for example, in the publishing business. They were often to be found operating shops and farms. Hufton notes more surprising instances of widows continuing in their husbands' occupation as gaolers. Unmarried women, especially widows, had some prospect of an independent life. However, the numbers of women choosing not to marry receded in times of rising real wages, and the same conditions lowered the average age at marriage.¹⁹ Hence, it is wise to remember that many women remained unmarried only because they did not have the means to start a new household with a husband. In the upper classes women often remained unmarried because their families could not provide sufficient dowries. Nonetheless, there were also women who chose not to marry in order to retain personal freedom. Defoe's Roxana explains why she has turned down an offer of marriage from a Dutch merchant: ‘… I had no need to give him twenty Thousand Pound to marry me, which had been buying my Lodging too dear a great deal.’²⁰ The case for women to eschew marriage was, of course, made most forcefully by Mary Astell, who, unlike Roxana, was not inclined to consider the merits of being a mistress. Rather, she proposed the establishment of an institution resembling a convent where women might study and develop themselves spiritually. Astell's college, though it was never established, became a landmark in feminist thinking of the period.²¹

The education of women at all levels of society was plainly inadequate. The universities excluded them altogether. This exclusion entailed that women writers would be less burdened by long-established literary models and possibly more disposed to develop their own forms and techniques. That a university education was not absolutely necessary for literary success can be seen in the career of Alexander Pope or Samuel Richardson. Yet systematic exclusion of women from higher education can only be seen as having forced the great majority of capable women out of the intellectual mainstream. Women's academies, in general, prepared the daughters of the wealthy to make their way in society, and sought to enhance their prospects of marriage. Whereas young men as a matter of course would study the classics, women would be instructed in painting, music, dancing, modern languages, or other accomplishments, but rarely would they be expected to achieve real competence.²² Indeed, a learned woman was likely to experience difficulty finding a husband, and education might cease to be any advantage. There were, nonetheless, women who managed to become well educated. Mary Wortley Montagu taught herself Latin and other languages, and read extensively in her father's library. Mehetabel Wright was instructed by her father, Samuel Wesley, and is said to have understood Greek by the age of 8. Elizabeth Carter and Constantia Grierson established themselves as classical scholars. Elizabeth Montagu became a leading Shakespearian critic. Most women who desired learning, however, acquired it by struggle, and in a manner which promoted a sense of inferiority even among the most gifted and widely read women. Indeed, the colourful story of Susanna Centlivre's sojourn at Cambridge supposedly disguised as a man presents an image of the woman entering the intellectual world by stealth. There is, however, no need to look for metaphors in the struggles of labouring women, including Mary Leapor, for whom education was a barely attainable luxury.

Women writers of the period, as well as sympathetic men, argued for better education as a means of improving the lot of women. It is significant that Charlotte Lennox's The Female Quixote, one of the most interesting novels of its time, is essentially a satire on women's education. Arabella, the heroine, is remarkably gifted, yet her reading is confined to French romances. She understands the world through trivial fictions, and is trapped within a child's view of history and society. Near the end of the novel the unnamed clergyman who is attempting to show Arabella how unreasonable her notions are, is left ‘in strange Embarrassment, not knowing how to account for a Mind at once so enlighten'd, and so ridiculous’.²³ The parson's words can surely be read as an indictment of women's education which, though it improved throughout the period, generally failed to realize their intellectual potential.

It is now well known that women of the eighteenth century produced books in almost all genres. Women's writing in the period has recently become an area of scholarly interest. There had been earlier studies of women writers, notably Myra Reynolds's The Learned Lady in England 1650-1760 (1920), and occasional studies of individual writers, but only since the 1970s have the conditions obtained for a comprehensive re-examination of these writers. Of particular importance is Janet Todd's A Dictionary of British and American Women Writers 1660-1800 (1984), which brings forward an enormous amount of information about writers, some of whom have been entirely unregarded for more than two centuries. In general, studies of women prose writers have outstripped by some distance studies of poets, apart from Lady Mary Wortley Montagu and the Countess of Winchilsea. This imbalance is unfortunate, since, as Pat Rogers observes: ‘there were more first-rate women poets than novelists in the period, and … poetry was still the place where ideas were growing most vigorously’.²⁴

A study of women writers can easily lose sight of broader literary relations, and inadvertently consign its subjects to a ghetto. Since 1987 there have been two valuable essays which examine women poets of the eighteenth century in relation to contemporary male writers. Jocelyn Harris takes as her point of departure Duncombe's The Feminiad.²⁵ Her approach is fruitful in that it explores major issues in women's poetry of the time and its relation to the literary mainstream. Also of considerable interest is Margaret Doody's ‘Swift among the Women’, which traces the Dean's influence on women poets of the time.²⁶ Both Harris and Doody take a particular interest in Mary Leapor's poetry.

The publication of Roger Lonsdale's Eighteenth-Century Women Poets: An Oxford Anthology (1989) was an event of considerable importance. The most obvious achievement of this book is that it located and republished many poets whose neglect was far deeper than that of Mary Leapor. Indeed, the appearance of Lonsdale's book revealed and at once remedied a huge gap in the study of women writers. Claire Tomalin, Mary Wollstonecraft's biographer, asks candidly in her review of the anthology: ‘How many women poets of the eighteenth century can most of us name? I was stuck after Anne, Countess of Winchilsea, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Joanna Baillie, Mrs. Barbauld and Helen Maria Williams.’²⁷ Apart from the simple work of recovery, Lonsdale provides a good deal of new biographical information about the poets, and, perhaps most importantly, his long introduction supplies a comprehensive history of women poets throughout the century. He accepts that the material defies easy summary and generalization (ECWP, p. xxii), but proceeds to survey the actual work of women poets, recognizing that there are always some who stand outside general trends. From the beginning to the end of the century, he observes that there was a huge increase in the amount of poetry published by women. This, in itself, indicates a change in the literary status of women. In the first decades, Lonsdale notes that there were a number of poets, such as Lady Mary Chudleigh, Octavia Walsh, Elizabeth Tollet, and Mehetabel Wright, who worked very much in isolation; these are not, however, entirely representative, since the Restoration ‘brought a new confidence and competence to women's verse’ (ECWP, p. xxii). Sarah Fyge Egerton, Elizabeth Rowe, the Countess of Winchilsea, and others asserted themselves in the literary mainstream. In the 1730s women found new outlets for their work through periodicals, especially the Gentleman's Magazine, and through subscription publishing. By the 1740s the numbers were increasing, although the best women poets, including Mary Leapor and Mary Jones, tended to be somewhat behind the times, modelling their work on Pope and Swift rather than responding to the new trend towards sensibility at mid-century. The 1750s marked an important transition, as works by such men as Duncombe and Ballard celebrated the achievements of women writers, and Colman and Thornton published the first edition of Poems by Eminent Ladies. In the 1750s the place of women in contemporary literature was much more widely recognized. The literary circles of Richardson and Johnson proved especially welcoming to women poets such as Elizabeth Carter, Anna Williams, Charlotte Lennox, and Hester Mulso Chapone. As the century went on, women poets exercised much greater influence on the literary scene. The appearance of Anna Seward, Anna Aikin Barbauld, Hannah More, Charlotte Smith, Helen Maria Williams, and others entailed that women were largely setting the poetic fashion from the late 1770s to the early 1790s. Indeed, the influence of women writers at the time was rising in many areas, as Fanny Burney's Evelina (1778) and Hannah Cowley's dramatic works placed them in the forefront of contemporary literature. The appearance of new literary circles around Elizabeth Montagu and Hester Thrale Piozzi was a further sign of women's improved status in the literary world.

In Lonsdale's view, the 1790s saw a reaction against women writers. New theories about education challenged women's intellectual credentials, since most of them lacked a knowledge of the classics. Wordsworth's polemics at the turn of the century implied strong criticism of fashionable women poets:

Superficially more democratic than Richard Steele's definition of the poet as a ‘very well-bred Man’, Wordsworth's notion of the poet may seem even more relentlessly masculine and, in the loftiness of his conception of poetic genius, even more exclusive … In attacking the ‘gaudy and inane phraseology’ of fashionable poetry, Wordsworth (ostensibly attacking Thomas Gray) was in fact echoing the charge repeatedly levelled at women poets by reviewers and others in the 1780s and 1790s …

(ECWP, p. xl)

Before long, a good deal of the poetry that women had written would seem decidedly out of date. Its exclusion from major anthologies made doubly sure that, after a generation or so, it would be read by almost no one.

Lonsdale's history of women poets through the century allows them to be understood against developments in the poetry written by men, whose dominance of fashion was challenged for only a short time towards the end of the period. Yet he also makes clear that a number of the best poets in his anthology were unbothered by developments in London: ‘Some homely writers had clearly never heard about the requirements of polite taste’ (ECWP, p. xxvi). Among these, towards the end of the period, are Susanna Blamire and Joanna Baillie, who are among the most heavily represented poets in the anthology. Indeed, if one considers the whole century, a surprising number of the heavily represented poets remained largely unaffected by changes in fashion, among them Mary Leapor, Mary Jones, Esther Lewis, Susanna Blamire, Elizabeth Hands, and Joanna Baillie. These poets generally prefer concrete description, and a versification reminiscent of Swift and Pope, to odes, abstraction, and sublime rhetoric. As a question of aesthetic value, it is hard to dispute Lonsdale's decision to give prominence to this material. Yet if one accepts that a number of very accomplished poets remained firmly off the routes of mainstream development, it must also be accepted that the history of women's poetry, and of poetry in general throughout the eighteenth century, has been written in a simplistic manner. Indeed, if so much is happening on the edges, one is obliged to ask again what is really characteristic of the period.

The rest of this [essay] will discuss Mary Leapor's work in so far as it responds specifically to her experience of being a woman. The first section will discuss Leapor's attitudes towards marriage and the family. The second will discuss her views of female friendship. The final section will consider her representation of the female body, especially in relation to contemporary ideals of beauty.

MARRIAGE, FAMILY, AND SEXUALITY

Mary Leapor's writings are given an extended feminist materialist reading by Donna Landry in The Muses of Resistance: Laboring-Class Women's Poetry in Britain, 1739-1796 (1990). In a sense, one can only be delighted that Leapor and other poets like her are receiving such serious attention. Yet, in view of the problems discussed in the first section of this chapter, it will be necessary to disagree with a number of Landry's principal arguments. First, her approach is decidedly teleological, and she makes no secret of her attempt to understand Leapor against the backdrop of recent feminist discourse: ‘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’ (p. 119). Although Landry makes clear that the shoe does not always fit, this sort of approach, as suggested above, is dangerous in that it shapes what a scholar is willing to see. This danger is most obvious in Landry's consistent use of the terms ‘heterosexual union’, ‘heterosexual attachment’, and ‘heterosexual couple’, where Leapor's meaning is simply marriage or married couple. Landry's concern is to explore sexual difference: ‘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’ (p. 84). The binary opposite of heterosexual is homosexual or lesbian; the binary opposite of married is single. It appears that Landry is intent on manipulating such terms, in order to perform an ideological deconstruction. Again, she makes no secret of this:

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.

(p. 88)

This reading of silences depends on the argument that the companionate ideal of marriage developed first among the privileged classes, and that in the eighteenth century lower-class women could expect little affection in marriage. Even if the historical argument were sound, an objection could be raised to the critical method: silences are sometimes extremely difficult to interpret. Indeed, Landry is mistaken even when she claims that the poems are silent on the question of lower-class marriage: in ‘The Month of August’, for example, Phillis, a country girl, believes that she will be happy in marriage to a man of her own class, and Leapor does not undermine that suggestion. Although in other poems Leapor shows that labouring-class women can be desperately unhappy in marriage, she is not unequivocal. Depending upon one's theoretical persuasion, Landry's approach is either deconstructive, and rather exciting, or merely tendentious.

Landry represents Leapor as the thoroughgoing enemy of patriarchy who ‘laughs at the fathers’. Yet, to promote this idea, she puts forward some very strange arguments. She provides a lopsided interpretation of Freemantle's report that on her death-bed the poet expressed concern for her father and asked that the subscription be carried on for his sake:

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.

(pp. 104-5)

In its way, this view of Leapor's last wishes is almost breathtaking. With a gesture to the conventions of death-bed narratives, Landry reads Freemantle's account as if it were a twentieth-century novel. Freemantle's letter shows that although Philip and Anne Leapor both attempted to break their daughter of the habit of writing verses, towards the end of the poet's life some accommodation was reached: ‘But finding it impossible to alter her natural Inclination, [her father] had of late desisted and left her more at Liberty’ (ii, p. xxx). Leapor's poetry makes clear that she suffered many distressing lectures from her father, yet if the two had reached an understanding—indeed, if they intended to use the money from the subscription to buy their freehold and have security for their life together—Landry's interpretation of this episode is simply captious. The same attempt to represent fathers in Leapor's writing purely as tyrants can likewise be seen in her interpretation of The Unhappy Father, which will be discussed below.

If Landry consistently overstates Leapor's radicalism, it remains true that by the standards of her time Leapor's views on marriage and the family were critical and hard-edged. That she could deal with the philosophical and ideological issues related to women's position in the family is evident from the poem ‘Man the Monarch’, in which she debunks the view that men's sovereignty over women derives from Adam:

          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.

(ML ii. 10)

The poem is a response to some book Leapor has been reading. Jocelyn Harris is almost certainly right when she suggests that she is, in fact, responding to John Locke,²⁸ who writes ‘Of Adam's Title to Sovereignty by the Subjection of Eve’:

if this be the Original Grant of Government and the Foundation of Monarchical Power, there will be as many Monarchs as there are Husbands. If therefore these words [Genesis 3: 16] give any Power to Adam, it can only be a Conjugal Power, not Political, the Power that every Husband hath to order the things of private Concernment in his Family, as the Proprietor of the Goods and Land there, and to have his Will take place before that of his wife in all things of their common Concernment; but not a Political Power of Life and Death over her, much less over any body else.²⁹

As is widely observed, rationalist philosophy paved the way for a re-examination of women's place in society and in the family.³⁰ If Locke could subject the divine right of kings to a critical examination, the rights of husbands were likewise vulnerable to a reasoned critique. The language of kingship, sovereignty, and liberty is taken from political philosophy and applied to marriage. Mary Astell writes: ‘how much soever Arbitrary Power may be dislik'd on a Throne, Not Milton himself wou'd cry up Liberty to poor Female Slaves, or plead for the Lawfulness of Resisting a Private Tyranny.’³¹ Leapor's contempt for the idea of ‘A long Succession of domestic Kings’ is close in spirit to a passage by ‘Sophia’, the pamphleteer:

I myself was accidentally witness to the diverting scene of a journeyman taylor's beating his wife about the ears with a neck of mutton, to make her know, as he said, her sovereign lord and master. And yet this, perhaps, is as strong an argument as the best of their sex is able to produce, tho' convey'd in a greasy light.³²

Both Leapor and ‘Sophia’ find something contemptible in the claims of men to automatic mastery over their wives. Indeed, for both it is ridiculous that a man who has no claim on the world's attention, should none the less be able to exact full obedience from his wife. This attitude, especially in ‘Sophia's’ case, may owe something to class-distinction, that is, a duke beating a duchess with a neck of mutton might prove less illustrative than a journeyman tailor doing such a thing to his wife. Yet the central point is that it is absurd to assume that any woman is less competent to direct her life than any man she marries.

In her rejection of a purely romantic view of the relations of men and women, Leapor's opinions on marriage are at a very great distance from those of more conventional women poets in her time. Mary Jones complains in a letter dated 1735 of the tediousness of most women's verse:

Whenever I meet with a Sister in print, I always expect to hear that Corydon has prov'd false; or that Sylvia's cruel Parents have had prudence enough to keep two mad People from playing the Fool together, for Life. I've often wish'd, for the honour of our Sex, that these Subjects had been exhausted seventeen hundred years ago; but am afraid that seventeen hundred years hence, we shall have the same false Corydon's, and the same complaining Sylvia's. 'Tis pity, that this passion alone should set us to Rhyming.³³

There were, of course, a good number of poets who moved beyond such limitations. Jones's comments are actually part of a favourable reaction to Mary Barber's poems. None the less, a woman poet who attacks the naïvety of a purely romantic view of marriage is, in some sense, going against the grain.

Jonathan Swift often presents a decidedly unpleasant view of women's sexuality, yet his poetry provided a model for women poets of the time who wished to expose the deceptions of romantic love, and the concealed dangers of marriage. For Swift, of course, the disillusionment will come when the man discovers that the woman he worshipped as a goddess is only too physical, as in ‘The Lady's Dressing Room’:

          Thus finishing his grand Survey,
Disgusted Strephon stole away
Repeating in his amourous Fits,
Oh! Celia, Celia, Celia shits!

(Swift, ii. 529)

‘The Lady's Dressing Room’ drew the fire of Mary Wortley Montagu and the unidentified Miss W———, both of whom wrote parodies of the poem.³⁴ Mary Leapor, in an octosyllabic satire, ‘The Mistaken Lover’, responds, according to Margaret Doody, to Swift's ‘Strephon and Chloe’, a poem which describes fashionable courtship and marriage.³⁵ Swift's Chloe manages to conceal perfectly all of her less attractive bodily functions:

Her graceful Mein, her Shape, and Face,
Confest her of no mortal Race:
And then, so nice, and so genteel;
Such Cleanliness from Head to Heel:
No Humours gross, or frowzy Steams,
No noisom Whiffs, or sweaty Streams,
Before, behind, above, below,
Could from her taintless Body flow

(Swift, ii. 584)

Chloe's beauty is a matter of hiding the dirty facts of the body. Strephon allows himself to be duped by the charms of this woman who, in Swift's view, seems immortal because she appears clean. In Leapor's poem, the deceptive exterior is not the woman's beauty but the beau's appearance. Having been wounded by her killing eyes, Strephon chooses his course:

What shou'd he do?—‘Commence the Beau,
‘For Women oft are caught by Show.’
The wounded Strephon now behold,
Array'd in Coat of Green and Gold,
(Of which we something might advance)
The Sleeve was a-la-mode de France.
We leave it here—and haste to tell,
How smartly round his Temples fell
The modish Wig.—Yet we presume,
More graceful was the scarlet Plume:
Tho' some rude Soldier (doom'd to bear
The Southern and the Northern Air,
And walk through ev'ry kind of Weather)
Might jeer at Strephon's scarlet Feather;
And tell us such shou'd ne'er be wore,
Unless you fought at Marston-moor.

(ML i. 81-2)

Although she describes a stereotypical beau, Leapor emphasizes that Strephon's artificial appearance is part of his strategy to deceive Celia. That he wears a soldier's plume without meriting it is meant to show that he is a bluff. In a passage which departs from Swift's model and follows John Gay's ‘The Fan’, Strephon pays court to Celia with serenades and sonnets, and all ‘the Lover's Cant’. In short order, Celia agrees, the documents are drawn up, and the wedding proceeds:

But I shall pass the Wedding-day,
Nor stay to paint the Ladies gay,
Nor Splendor of the lighted Hall,
The Feast, the Fiddles, nor the Ball.
A lovely Theme!—'Tis true, but then
We'll leave it to a softer Pen:
Those transient Joys will fade too soon,
We'll therefore skip the Hony-Moon.

(ML i. 83)

Leapor is here parting company with conventional love poetry, leaving that to others who have ‘a softer Pen’; Swift himself gives some space to describing wedding festivities, though the bitter revelation is expected shortly.

At this point in the poem Leapor, like Swift, attempts to account for the eventual unhappiness of the marriage. For Swift, the reason is that the marriage is based on an idealization of the woman. Marriage brings with it a disconcerting reality:

          How great a Change! how quickly made!
They learn to call a Spade, a Spade.
They soon from all Constraint are freed;
Can see each other do their Need.

(Swift, ii. 590)

The magic wears off, and Swift advises women that they have only themselves to blame for a husband's loss of enthusiasm if they do not keep themselves clean:

          Unjustly all our Nymphs complain,
Their Empire holds so short a Reign;
Is after Marriage lost so soon,
It hardly holds the Honey-moon:
For, if they keep not what they caught,
It is entirely their own Fault.

(Swift, ii. 591)

Leapor, however, will have none of this. The truths that are recognized after marriage have very little to do with chamber pots. Rather, the husband's motives are exposed. Strephon has married Celia because she could bring ‘Five thousand Pounds of Sterling clear, ❙ To bless the Mansion of her Dear’. For Leapor, this is the hidden danger where a woman surrenders financial control in marriage:

          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.

(ML i. 84)

Leapor rejects Swift's view: Strephon, having secured his wife's money, offers the feeble excuse for his dissipated behaviour that he was mistaken about her physical charms before they were married:

‘But Ma'm, the Reason was, I find,
That while a Lover I was blind:
And now the Fault is not in me,
'Tis only this—that I can see.
I thought you once a Goddess trim,
The Graces dwelt on ev'ry Limb:
But, Madam, if you e'er was such,
Methinks you're alter'd very much …’

(ML i. 87-8)

Strephon goes on to recount the various features which once inspired his love but now leave him cold:

‘As first (I beg your Pardon tho’)
You hold your Head extremely low:
And tho' your Shape is not awry,
Your Shoulders stand prodigious high:
Your curling Hair I durst have swore,
Was blacker than the sable Moore:
But now I find 'tis only brown,
A Colour common through the Town:
'Tis true you're mighty fair—But now
I spy a Freckle on your Brow;
Your Lips I own are red and thin,
But there's a Pimple on your Chin:
Besides your Eyes are gray—Alack!
'Till now I always thought 'em black.

(ML i. 88)

Nowhere in this catalogue of imperfections is there anything particularly unpleasant, certainly nothing to convince the reader that Strephon has discovered something repulsive about Celia's body. Strephon is simply attempting to excuse his loss of interest in Celia. In the end, Leapor proposes an explanation for marital disaffection far simpler than Swift's:

          ‘Thus, Madam, I the Truth have told;
'Tis true, I thank you for your Gold;
But find in searching of my Breast,
That I could part with all the Rest.’

(ML i. 88)

Doody notes that Leapor picks up Swift's characters or anti-characters and turns them to her own purposes.³⁶ As a subversion of what is already a mock form, Leapor's poem has its own sophistication. She agrees with Swift that coquettes and beaux tend not to live happily ever after, but she takes an altogether different view of the reasons. She believes that women with property or money are especially attractive to men, and that once that advantage has been surrendered, the husband may simply lose interest.

Leapor also produced several shorter satires on fashionable courtship and marriage. The tone is evident from some of the titles: ‘Proper Ingredients for the Head of a Beau, found among the Rules of Prometheus’; ‘The Sow and the Peacock’; ‘Strephon to Celia: A modern Love Letter’. In each of these she takes aim at that object of Scriblerian mockery, the beau. Her satire, however, is always underpinned by an awareness of women's vulnerability.

Leapor's belief that a man's attractive appearance or manner may conceal something treacherous is reiterated throughout her writing. Her treatment of courtship and betrayal in ‘Complaining Daphne’ bears careful examination. In this pastoral Daphne is longing for the return of her ‘cruel, marble-hearted Swain’ [ii. 74]. She comes to believe, however, that she is probably better off without him:

Yet he may wear a Heart replete with Guile,
And cover Mischief with a fraudful Smile:
And foolish Daphne to her cost shall find
Her heav'nly Cynthio like his earthly Kind.

(ML ii. 76)

Cynthio has something in common with Strephon in ‘The Mistaken Lover’. His pleasant appearance and delightful manner conceal bad motives. Daphne has no money for him to take, but there is the perennial fear of seduction. In a striking passage Daphne recalls working in the fields with her mother, falling ill from the heat, and being consoled by stories about love. Interestingly, John Clare also describes old women singing and telling stories during the weeding and haymaking.³⁷ Evidently ‘Complaining Daphne’, though a pastoral, has an actual connection with the life of agricultural labour in Northamptonshire. Clare does not specify what the songs and stories were; Leapor's account emphasizes tales of betrayal in love:

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.

(ML ii. 77-8)

The poem, at this point, is by no means radical. Leapor has described a pining country girl and ‘her cruel, marble-hearted Swain’, both of the sort Mary Jones found so tedious: ‘the same false Corydon's, and the same complaining Sylvia's’. The essential affirmation in the poem is that a young woman should preserve her virginity, again nothing remarkable. A mother advising her daughter to beware of men is likewise in the normal course of things. Donna Landry sees the poem rather differently:

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 …

(Landry, 90)

It must be observed that the point of the mother's stories was not that Daphne should embrace her sister shepherdesses in a sapphic idyll, but, very simply, that she should not allow herself to be seduced. The conclusion of the poem does, however, point to a repudiation of sexual passion:

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.

(ML ii. 78-9)

The sylvan sisters are ‘spotless’ and an alternative to guilty passion with Cynthio; Daphne will be safe from sexual feeling and sexual betrayal in their company. Her options are not precisely heterosexuality and lesbianism, but rather seduction and chastity. Leapor characteristically affirms the value of female friendship, while rejecting idealized romantic love. Although the poem is conventional in several respects, it ends critically, not with the shepherdess cheered up by a song or by the sight of another attractive shepherd, but with Daphne recognizing that she has been gullible about her young man. That Daphne repudiates ‘the lordly Race’ indicates that she sees sexual betrayal as a form of domination.

Leapor's views on marriage are ambiguous. That she could not find a simple solution to the problems of women in marriage can be seen from two poems entitled ‘Mira to Octavia’ which advise a young woman who has fallen in love with an unsuitable man. The poem which appears in the first volume is relatively simple in its advice. The one in the second volume is longer and far more detailed, suggesting that Octavia had rejected the reasoning of the earlier piece. In the first poem Leapor writes:

                                                            your Servant has been told,
That you, (despising Settlements and Gold)
Determine Florio witty, young and gay,
To have and hold for ever and for ay …

(ML i. 258)

Octavia is willing to marry a dashing young man for love. In Leapor's view, her friend has failed to recognize that beneath the charming exterior there may be something very unpleasant:

I know, to shun, you hold it as a Rule,
The arrant Coxcomb and the stupid Fool:
No such is Florio, he has Wit—'tis true,
Enough, Octavia, to impose on you:
Yet such a Wit you'll, by Experience, find
Worse than a Fool that's complaisant and kind:
It only serves to gild his Vices o'er,
And teach his malice how to wound the more.

(ML i. 258)

A marriage begun without financial security looks hazardous to the poet, let alone one where the man seems cunning and manipulative. She foresees a future when those qualities Octavia admires in Florio will be only an irrelevance:

Now cou'd your Florio by his Wit inspire
The chilly Hearth, to blaze with lasting Fire:
Or when his Children round the Table throng,
By an Allusion or a sprightly Song,
Adorn the Board, i'th' twinkling of an Eye,
With a hot Pasty or a Warden Pye,
There might be Reason on Octavia's Side,
And not a Sage cou'd blame the prudent Bride.

(ML i. 259)

Leapor goes on to observe that although knights in romances may ‘… sup on Grass and breakfast on the Breeze’, that is nothing which Octavia could bear. Instead, she should consider the merits of another suitor, Dusterandus, who, though less charming than Florio, is more likely to prove a good husband:

                                                            He whose stedfast Mind
Is yet untainted, tho' not much refin'd;
Whose Soul ne'er roves beyond his native Fields;
Nor asks for Joys but what his Pasture yields;
On Life's dull Cares with Patience can attend,
A gentle Master and a constant Friend …

(ML i. 260)

Leapor is adamant that her friend will be happier with a man who is dependable and who lives within his means. She also sees a contrast between the wounding tongue of Florio and the more gentle, if less polished, manner of Dusterandus. The prospect of lasting affection is greater with Dusterandus. At all costs, she would dispel her friend's idealized view of marriage: ‘In spite of all romantick Poets sing; ❙ This Gold, my Dearest, is an useful thing’ (ML i. 261). In this poem, therefore, Leapor argues that happiness in marriage is available to Octavia if she chooses wisely.

The second poem to Octavia opens with little change from the first. Mira may not, however, continue to criticize the man Octavia wants to marry:

Frown not, sweet Virgin; we'll Decorums keep;
Philander's Faults shall in Oblivion sleep.
Peace to his Name!—These only are design'd
A simple Lecture to our easy Kind.

(ML ii. 102)

Leapor's first poem was evidently not well received. In the second, the attack on Florio's character is dropped, and the man is now called Philander, a possible borrowing from Aphra Behn. Dusterandus is not mentioned, perhaps because Octavia simply did not care even to consider his merits as a husband. Leapor adopts the less offensive course of a generalized commentary: ‘Of Wives I sing, and Husbands, not a Few: ❙ Examples rare! some fictious, and some true’ (ML ii. 102). Through the rest of the poem she offers examples of marriages in which a promising husband proves neglectful or vicious. The first of these seems to take account of Octavia's objections to Dusterandus. Leapor describes the condition of a woman named Pamela who marries a stupid man:

But could our Eyes behold the deep Recess,
Where soft Pamela's thoughts in private rest,
You'd find, in spite of Hymen's sacred Vows,
Ten Hours in Twelve that she abhors her Spouse.

(ML ii. 103)

Leapor goes on to describe a woman married to a clergyman who is universally virtuous and ‘Pleasant to all except his doating Bride’ (ML ii. 104). Another woman, Virgo, marries Tycho, an astronomer, who has time for nothing lower than the stars and the planets. A prude, Chloe, marries a zealot, Enthusiano, who eventually locks her up with directions to say her prayers, as he goes to his mistress. Leapor insists that she has not exaggerated the perils of marriage:

          Poets and Painters then, perhaps you'll cry,
Oft in their Satire, and their Canvas, lye.
But, dear Octavia, in the Case of Wife,
I fear the Shade but faintly Apes the Life.

(ML ii. 108)

Leapor is attempting to dissuade her friend from a particular marriage through generalized arguments. She uses the vignettes to explode a naïve view of romantic fulfilment in marriage. Since she is not to discuss the faults of the particular man involved, and since nothing is to be gained by arguing for the uninspiring Dusterandus, she attempts to convince her friend that marriage per se is risky, even if there is some chance of a happy outcome:

          Yet, not a Rebel to your Hymen's Law,
His sacred Altars I behold with Awe:
Nor Foe to Man; for I acknowledge yet
Some Men have Honour, as some Maids have Wit.
But then remember, these, my learned Fair,
Old Authors tell us, are extremely rare.

(ML ii. 109)

Leapor does not make the case that women are always unhappy in marriage. Since she is not going to advise Octavia to marry the suspect Philander, she suggests celibacy:

          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.
The Grave and Sprightly shall thy Board attend,
The gay Companion, and the serious Friend.

(ML ii. 109)

Leapor makes general assertions about marriage in this poem partly because she cannot make further particular observations without offending Octavia. How, then, are these assertions to be understood—as a radical statement of separatist principles, or as a rhetorical posture? In both poems, Leapor attempts to debunk unreal expectations of marriage. She considers it to be a gamble for any woman, a gamble which can only be justified where the woman examines the character and prospects of the man she is to marry. In some cases, it is best to remain celibate. Since Octavia will save a substantial dowry, she will have a prosperous independence. The one indisputable position which connects the two poems is that Octavia should not marry Florio or Philander on the slender hope that love will prevail.

In Leapor's view, the problems of women in relation to marriage are not immediately curable. There is no obvious choice which will set women free. ‘An Essay on Woman’, though very much a poem of protest against the injustices women suffer, offers no simple solutions. The poem opens with a grim summary of the lot of a woman:

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.

(ML ii. 64)

Marriage exposes the woman to tyranny, while celibacy leaves her scarcely better off. Olwen Hufton maintains that in the eighteenth century the stereotypical spinster was ‘one to be despised, pitied, and avoided as a sempiternal spoilsport in the orgy of life’.³⁸ It is hard to imagine that Leapor would sentimentalize the condition of celibacy, especially if she found herself mocked as an old maid. Indeed, she, like Johnson, is aware how few the pleasures would be. Celibacy is, at best, the lesser evil; by no means is it regarded as a panacea. Women who are courted by men are, however, in greater danger of being deceived and exploited:

'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?

(ML ii. 64)

A woman without wealth will have few suitors, but a woman who can produce a large dowry will have more than her share of acquisitive Strephons writing sonnets. Compliments, however, last only

Till mighty Hymen lifts his sceptred Rod,
And sinks her Glories with a fatal Nod;
Dissolves her Triumphs; sweeps her Charms away,
And turns the Goddess to her native Clay.

(ML ii. 65)

Flattery conceals greed, and marriage will bring a hard realization to women who readily believe the compliments of their suitors or, indeed, their promises of fidelity. Moreover, Leapor can see no means of improving the situation. Wealth, beauty, and wit are all shown to be insufficient means for securing affection and happiness. Sylvia, for example, is beautiful: ‘And yet That Face her partial Husband tires, ❙ And those bright Eyes, that all the World admires’ (ML ii. 65). Pamphilia, a self-portrait of the poet, seems to annoy both men and women by her learning:

Pamphilia's Wit who does not strive to shun,
Like Death's Infection, or a Dog-Day's Sun?
The Damsels view her with malignant Eyes:
The Men are vex'd to find a Nymph so wise:
And Wisdom only serves to make her know
The keen Sensation of superior Woe.

(ML ii. 65-6)

Leapor was without question committed to educating herself, and yet here she asks whether her struggle is worth the insults and the discouragement. A woman who wishes to achieve an enjoyable life by accumulating wealth is likewise deceived. Leapor sees such a woman degrading herself as a miser:

Then let her quit Extravagance and Play;
The brisk Companion; and expensive Tea;
To feast with Cordia in her filthy Sty
On stew'd Potatoes, or on mouldy Pye;
Whose eager Eyes stare ghastly at the Poor,
And fright the Beggars from her hated Door:
In greasy Clouts she wraps her smoky Chin,
And holds, that Pride's a never-pardon'd Sin.

(ML ii. 66)

This image of the financially independent woman is repugnant to Leapor, who would rather remain poor but take some enjoyment from her life:

          If this be Wealth, no matter where it falls;
But save, ye Muses, save your Mira's Walls:
Still give me pleasing Indolence, and Ease;
A Fire to warm me, and a Friend to please.

(ML ii. 67)

The means of escaping poverty are not worth pursuing by a woman who genuinely wishes to be happy. In the end, there is nothing better to be expected than dignified poverty with the consolation of friendship. This is the best that can be hoped for, even if it is a long way from a fully satisfying life. At the end of the poem every difficulty remains:

Since, whether sunk in Avarice, or Pride;
A wanton Virgin, or a starving Bride;
Or, wond'ring Crouds attend her charming Tongue;
Or deem'd an Idiot, ever speaks the Wrong:
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.

(ML ii. 67)

Leapor's rage is unmistakable: women are essentially trapped. Yet she is prepared to fight for her dignity, and, indeed, believes it is in women's characters to resist a tyranny, even if they are deprived of the hope of success. These lines make the poem's opening reference to women's softness and weakness sound like an ironic echo of Pope's ‘Epistle to a Lady’:

Nothing so true as what you once let fall,
Most Women have no Characters at all.
Matter too soft a lasting mark to bear,
And best distinguish'd by black, brown, or fair.

(Pope, iii. ii. 46)

If Leapor can find no clear path to freedom she is willing at least to raise a forceful argument against the way women are understood. The title of the poem, ‘An Essay on Woman’, is certainly a reference to Pope. Leapor's ‘An Essay on Friendship’ is a more comprehensive rebuttal of Pope's ‘Epistle to a Lady’ (see below), yet it is evident that she also has the poem in mind when she is writing ‘An Essay on Woman’. This may be judged simply on the basis of two small echoes: Pope has characters named Simplicius and Papillia, Leapor has Simplicus and Pamphilia. More importantly, Pope writes:

          See how the World its Veterans rewards!
A Youth of frolicks, an old Age of Cards,
Fair to no purpose, artful to no end,
Young without Lovers, old without a Friend,
A Fop their Passion, but their Prize a Sot,
Alive, ridiculous, and dead, forgot.

(Pope, iii. ii. 69-70)

Leapor and Pope see the general condition of women as a series of contradictions. For Pope, these contradictions are follies to be satirized; for Leapor, they are injustices to be protested against. As Pope can imagine a Martha Blount who is an exception to the follies of her sex, so, in Leapor's poetry, the happy woman is an exception because she has escaped the general trap. It would, of course, be wrong to view Pope or even Swift as a simple woman-hater. Leapor, whose own techniques and interests have been deeply influenced by both poets, none the less disputes their general understanding of women's unhappiness. For her, women are not merely the authors of their own misfortunes or, at best, ‘softer men’, but the victims of an unjust order.

Leapor's treatment of the family is not limited to the relations of husbands and wives. In her poem ‘The Cruel Parent’, she describes the suffering of a young woman who is starved by her father. To what extent this relates to Leapor's own circumstances is not certain. The poem is not addressed to Artemisia and is, on that account, probably from some time before that friendship commenced. The poem is set in the night and opens: ‘lonely Mira with her Head reclin'd, ❙ And mourn'd the Sorrows of her helpless Kind’ (i. 273). What Mira's own immediate sorrows are is not stated: rather, she describes the pains of Celia:

Then to her Fancy Celia's Woes appear,
The Nymph, whose Tale deserves a pitying Tear;
Whose early Beauties met a swift Decay;
A Rose that faded at the rising Day,
While Grief and Shame oppress'd her tender Age,
Pursu'd by Famine and a Father's Rage …

(ML i. 274)

Evidently Celia suffers more terribly than Mira, though the poet identifies with her. Mira falls asleep and dreams luridly about Celia, whose father, Lysegus, keeps her locked in a room in a castle, and refuses to feed her. Instead, he berates her and describes the misery she might expect as a beggar. Eventually she drops dead, and Lysegus is speared by a supernatural visitor.

Since there is no indication what Mira is unhappy about, or whether Leapor was thinking of any real person in Celia, it is very difficult to judge the significance of this poem. It could be speculated that it was written after Leapor's dismissal from Edgcote House, and that her father was extremely angry at her returning as his dependant. By this reasoning, Leapor's only way of striking back at the father to whom she was looking for support was to write a poem as a cathartic fantasy. Donna Landry believes that the poem ‘presents an iconography of paternal despotism and daughterly humiliation scarcely to be met with elsewhere in eighteenth-century verse’ (Landry, 103). Unarguably, the father in the poem is a despot, and the daughter is humiliated. Landry's views on Leapor are most nearly justified in relation to this piece. Yet the poem stands apart from the attitudes most commonly expressed in her work, and, given its obscurity, it is necessary to be cautious with respect to its specific meaning. Contrary to Landry's claim, moreover, Leapor's treatment of conflict between a father and daughter is by no means unique in eighteenth-century poetry. Lady Dorothea Dubois, for example, describes an attempt to be reconciled with her bigamous father, the Earl of Anglesey, as he is dying. The old man repudiates her, and she is driven out of the house by her half-brother and a gang of servants:

His base-born Son, a Pistol e'en presents,
Behind her Head; but watchful Heav'n prevents
The Fiend from executing his Intents.
They pull and drag her, tear her Hands and Cloak,
Nay dare uplift their own to give a Stroke:
Force her from Room to Room, then down the Stairs,
Nor heed her piteous Cries, nor flowing Tears.
Some, more humane, now shook indeed their Head
As they pass'd by, but nothing still they said.
(Scarce two Months past a dang'rous Lying-in,
Such cruel Usage surely was a Sin.)
.....Her Servants now are ty'd, her Horse's Ear
Inhumanly cut off: 'tis much they spare
Dorinda's Life …(39)

Dubois actually wrote a number of poems arguing her claims against her father. Somewhat earlier, Sarah Fyge Egerton had complained in poems, admittedly less violent, that her father had banished her from London for publishing ‘The Female Advocate’. Accordingly, it is difficult to maintain that ‘The Cruel Parent’ is in any way unique. It is certainly Leapor's most angry description of a father figure, and must owe something to her disagreements with her own father. While it could be said that an extreme poem reveals hidden struggles most clearly, it may also be remote from the poet's characteristic beliefs and attitudes. At the very least, the poem can be said to show Leapor's awareness of the vulnerability of an unmarried woman who is dependent on her father for financial support. Whether it confirms her as the enemy of patriarchy, as one who ‘laughs at the fathers’, is doubtful.

Leapor's play The Unhappy Father provides a complex treatment of issues relating to marriage and the family. As Betty Rizzo observes, it is a domestic tragedy in the manner of Nicholas Rowe, a she-tragedy.⁴⁰ The woman at the centre of the work is Terentia, an orphan under the care of a widower, Dycarbas. His two sons, Polonius and Lycander, compete for Terentia's affections. In order to defuse this rivalry, Dycarbas resolves that both sons should leave home for a time. Terentia, who has chosen Polonius over Lycander, initially resents Dycarbas's action:

Last Night I heard—I heard with wounded Ears,
Your cruel Father (never so till then)
Give the strict Orders for your hasty Voyage.
My swelling Heart was stung with bitter Grief;
But you receiv'd the Sentence with a Smile.

(ML ii. 131)

By the end of this scene, however, Terentia is expressing fulsome gratitude to Dycarbas for saving her from an uncle who had wanted to steal her inheritance. There is no doubt of her regard for Dycarbas:

If Deeds like this demand a Blessing, then
Sure Heav'n has Millions still in Store for you:
For You, ascend the Pray'rs of hoary Age,
Who share the Comfort of your bounteous Hand:
Deserted Babes are taught to lisp your Name,
And, smiling, stretch their little Hands to you.

(ML ii. 133)

Terentia goes offstage and, in a soliloquy, Dycarbas explains his actions. First, however, he asks for divine guidance: ‘Assist me, Heav'n! and teach me how to act ❙ In this so nice, so delicate affair’ (ML ii. 134). He accepts Terentia's choice of Polonius: ‘Her Inclination my Consent has joined ❙ To give this beauteous Blessing to Polonius’ (ML ii. 135). There is no question that Dycarbas has any intention of opposing Terentia's decision, though he is conscious of having authority in the matter. His purpose in sending his sons away is solely to prevent conflict between them until Lycander also accepts Terentia's decision. There are, then, no grounds to believe, as Landry does (p. 103), that he is wilful in his disposition of his children's affective lives; indeed, his most important act is essentially to defend Terentia's freedom.

To focus on Dycarbas is unfortunately something of a distraction; his supposedly ‘fumbling interventions’ (Landry, 103) have little to do with the outcome of the play, and the final disasters are exclusively the result of sexual jealousy among the young male characters. Lycander describes his passion for Terentia to his sister Emilia:

O my Emilia, I've surviv'd myself,
And know not how to act in this new Being.
How comes it? I, whose Soul was only read
In stern Philosophy, and sacred Morals;
Who look'd on Beauty with a careless Eye,
Nor paid the least Attention to its Charms;
What Magic bids me now so fondly dote
On what so lately I disdain'd to look on?
Woman, a Feather in the Cap of Nature!
I hate the Sex: And yet I love Terentia.

(ML ii. 156)

Lycander is cold and intellectual. Ordinarily he has no respect whatever for women: indeed, his attraction to Terentia goes against his reason, philosophy, and morality. Although he accepts his father's command, he delays his departure for one last meeting which Emilia, his accomplice, arranges with the reluctant Terentia. This act of disobedience leads to the subsequent massacre.

Perhaps the most interesting character in the play is Emilia, whose marriage to Eustathius is characterized by serious arguments and frequent reconciliations. Despite Dycarbas's efforts to persuade Eustathius and command Emilia, they cannot moderate their behaviour. When Leonardo, a cousin who had once wished to marry Emilia, appears, intent on revenge, it is very easy for him to provoke Eustathius' Othello-like jealousy. Leonardo forges a love letter from Emilia, and bribes a servant to deliver it to Eustathius along with Emilia's stolen glove. The letter invites Leonardo to a tryst in the grove where Terentia is to meet Lycander. Eustathius' anger reaches a new height and, after an exchange with him, Emilia complains:

Is this the Treatment of unhappy Wives?
Ah! who would then be counted in the Number?
And why did Heav'n's creating Power form
Amongst his Works, one Creature only doom'd
To lasting Anguish, and perpetual Chains?
And yet inspir'd us with a thinking Soul,
To taste our Sorrows with a keener Relish?
Our servile Tongues are taught to cry for Pardon
Ere the weak Senses know the Use of Words:
Our little Souls are tortur'd by Advice;
And moral Lectures stun our Infant Years:
Thro' check'd Desires, Threatnings, and Restraint,
The Virgin runs; but ne'er outgrows her Shackles;
They still will fit her, even to hoary Age.
With lordly Rulers Women still are curs'd;
But the last Tyrant always proves the worst.

(ML ii. 190)

This soliloquy, one of Leapor's strongest statements on the treatment of women, was, as Betty Rizzo observes, mentioned by none of her eighteenth-century admirers (Rizzo, 328). Doubtless such a protest would have upset the meek image of the poet promoted during the subscriptions. Yet these lines contain an anger encountered again and again in her work, that, from the constraints of a girl's upbringing to the tyrannies of marriage, there is small hope of a woman achieving the life she wants. It is probable that the soliloquy is based on a speech of Calisto in Rowe's The Fair Penitent:

          How hard is the Condition of our Sex,
Thro' ev'ry State of Life the Slaves of Man?
In all the dear delightful Days of Youth,
A rigid Father dictates to our Wills,
And deals out Pleasure with a scanty Hand;
To his, the Tyrant Husband's Reign succeeds
Proud with Opinion of superior Reason,
He holds Domestick Bus'ness and Devotion
All we are capable to know, and shuts us,
Like Cloyster'd Ideots, from the World's Acquaintance,
And all the Joys of Freedom; wherefore are we
Born with high Souls, but to assert our selves,
Shake off this vile Obedience they exact,
And claim an equal Empire o'er the World?(41)

Protests of this sort are difficult to contain within the patriarchal conventions of the tragedy. Emilia, it turns out, has moral defects: she fights with her husband and disobeys her father. That Emilia makes the speech suggests that Leapor at this point in her career is uncertain of how far she can press the argument. When it comes from Emilia's mouth, Leapor can partly disown the content of the speech as a manifestation of Emilia's moral failings. If an entirely innocent character, Terentia perhaps, embarked on an angry critique of patriarchy, it would be very difficult to remain within the tragic form, and ultimately impossible to interest a producer in the script. When the bloodbath begins, Emilia is stabbed by her husband, who is killed by Lycander, who then kills Leonardo and takes a mortal wound himself. In all of this sanguinary excess, it is the guilty who die. The only innocent person to perish in the play is Dycarbas, an old man already resigned to the will of God:

For soon this feeble Case, worn out with Age,
Shall sleep and moulder in its dusty Cell.
Then the freed Spirit shall exulting fly …

(ML ii. 206)

The reported death of Polonius causes Dycarbas's final collapse, and brings Terentia to the verge of suicide. The reassertion of order in the play comes with Polonius's return. He assumes the authority of the patriarch and saves Terentia from her weakness. At the end they look forward to a married life together in a world diminished by the events of the play. There is no question that Leapor's play concludes with a reaffirmation of patriarchal values. Yet the portrayal of sexual violence, combined with Emilia's protest, leaves the impression that the conclusion does not entirely resolve thematic contradictions.

In her second play, untitled and completed only to the third act, Leapor finds scope within the historical events surrounding the short reign of the Saxon King Edwy or Eadwig (955-9) to study once more the problems of marriage and sexual violence. In this play, the king and his army do battle, presumably at Gloucester, with a larger force representing ambitious elements in the Church. The two soldiers leading the rebel armies, Odoff and Dusterandus, are motivated partly by a desire to take Edwy's wife, Elgiva, and her sister, Emmel, as spoils:

O how 'twou'd please my Pride to clasp her here
To this glad Breast!—While Horror, Rage, and Grief,
Shall reign alternate in her glowing Eyes!
Whilst raving, weeping, struggling in my Arms,
I gaze with Rapture on her vary'd Charms.

(ML ii. 250)

The treatment of the two sisters as objects for possession and domination is given a further and perhaps more insidious turn by their mother, Eleonora, who by ‘serpentizing Fraud’ uses her daughters to gain political advantage. In the first instance she arranges the marriage of Elgiva to the sensitive and naïve king. While this proves a very happy marriage, it also gives Eleonora the influence she desires. At the beginning of the play she persuades Edwy to reject offers of peace from the rebellious monks, who are, in fact, her enemies far more than the king's. When it appears that Edwy will lose the battle, she tries to purchase her survival by delivering her daughters to Odoff and Dusterandus. The chiefs renege on the deal and she is stabbed as she tries to entice Odoff herself. From this point, the play is unfinished.

The events upon which the play is based suggest an interesting examination of the forces opposing happiness in marriage. Edwy survived and retreated from the battle at Gloucester, and a meeting of the Witan divided his kingdom. In the following year, 958, a bishop forced the separation of Edwy and his wife on the grounds of consanguinity. Edwy died in 959 at the age of 19 (DNB vi. 558). If the play had been completed, it would have shown the marriage of Edwy and Elgiva destroyed by parental manipulation and political intrigue.

Leapor portrays Edwy as a heroic figure and a good husband. Elgiva, like Terentia in the earlier play, is powerless: she is effectively sold by her mother and then held prisoner by men intent on raping her. Eleonora herself is the most concentrated depiction of evil in Leapor's writings. The play portrays a good marriage torn apart by external forces. It certainly embodies an affective ideal of marriage, yet it is also the work of a woman who was convinced that marriage is fraught with dangers.

Leapor does not utterly repudiate marriage: repeatedly in her work she offers examples of marriages which could bring a woman some kind of satisfaction. She is keenly aware, however, of the deceptions to which a woman is exposed in courtship, and of the possibility that a husband may simply prove a tyrant. Yet she cannot find an entirely satisfactory alternative, for the life of the spinster is often portrayed in stark terms. Although it appears that she reached a peace with her father, she found herself constrained within that relationship. Her ambivalence towards him is reflected in her work as she portrays several fathers who are sympathetic, and one especially who is repugnant. On balance, however, her poetry is pessimistic about marriage and women's place in the family. It is perhaps a measure of Leapor's character that, even where there is little hope that injustice will be overcome, she is willing to raise a protest.

WOMEN'S FRIENDSHIP

Mary Leapor's poetry consistently affirms the value of women's friendship. Even though many writers before her had made a similar affirmation, not least Katherine Phillips and Mary Astell, it must be recognized that to make such claims was to dispute a widely held belief, based on Aristotelian physiology, that women were by nature soft and therefore inconstant.⁴² The best-known statement of this view of women is Pope's ‘Epistle to a Lady’. Some women actually accepted Pope's view, albeit with sorrow. Sarah Dixon, for example, wrote on the loss of a friend:

Ingenious Pope! whose better Skill
Can dive into a Woman's Will,
How truly have the Numbers told
‘Her Soul is of too soft a Mould,
A lasting Character to hold.’(43)

Other women were willing to argue that if there was truth in Pope's portraits of women, the cause of their failings was not, as he suggested, a weakness of nature. Lady Irwin in ‘An Epistle to Mr. Pope’ spoke of women ‘Whose mind a savage waste unpeopled lies’. For her, any difference between men and women was accounted for by education:

          What makes y(e) diff'rence then, you may enquire,
Between the hero, and the rural 'squire;
Between the maid bred up with courtly care,
Or she who earns by toil her daily fare:
Their power is stinted, but not so their will;
Ambitious thoughts the humblest cottage fill;
Far as they can they push their little fame,
And try to leave behind a deathless name.
In education all the diff'rence lies;
Women, if taught, would be as bold and wise
As haughty man, improv'd by art and rules;
Where God makes one, neglect makes twenty fools.

(GM 6 (1736), 745)

Irwin's poem, it should be noted, was written more than a decade before Gray's ‘Elegy’. She sees similarities between the wasted potential of women and that of the poor. Although it would be wrong to see the injustices suffered by a Viscountess as equivalent to those of the poor, Irwin's willingness to examine questions of gender and class together make ‘An Epistle to Mr. Pope’ a striking and significant composition. Somewhat later, Mary Whateley, following Pope's style very closely, suggests that it is not necessary for women to respond in kind to misogynistic satire:

          Satire on Men superfluous wou'd be,
What they approve, by our own Sex we see.
Since Woman's Happiness depends on Man;
'Tis easy to conclude where first began
This Group of Follies, that o'erspread the Earth:
From our wise Lords they first receiv'd their Birth;
These our fond Females, bent to please Mankind,
Enlarg'd, exalted, soften'd, and refin'd.(44)

Trivial behaviour in women ultimately reveals the folly of men's minds: women have become what men desire. Pope's Epistle is probably the most important statement of the dominant view of women in the eighteenth century, and women writing explicitly about issues of gender often found it necessary to confront this poem.

Mary Leapor appears to have given a great deal of thought to Pope's ‘Epistle to a Lady’. ‘An Essay on Woman’ rejects the belief that women are soft and incapable of an active life. In the second ‘Mira to Octavia’ poem, Leapor draws on Pope in a crucial passage:

          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.

(ML ii. 109)

Although there are other possible sources, it is most likely that these lines are an echo of Pope's comments on Martha Blount's celibacy:

Ascendant Phoebus watch'd that hour with care,
Averted half your Parents simple Pray'r,
And gave you Beauty, but deny'd the Pelf
Which buys your sex a Tyrant o'er itself.

(Pope, iii. ii. 73)

Leapor offers to her friend the choice Pope applauded in Martha Blount. Indeed, this debt must be recognized: while Leapor disagrees with much of ‘Epistle to a Lady’, she also accepts much. Throughout her work, she tends to regard the happy, mature, and stable woman as an ideal reached only occasionally, and to believe that most women are unhappy and inclined to unworthy behaviour. Whereas Pope sees this as an inevitable consequence of women's softness, Leapor believes that women can actually improve themselves.

‘Essay on Friendship’ is particularly significant among Leapor's works. Although its language is not as remarkable as that of some of her other poems, it reveals a great deal about her attitudes towards gender, and towards her own writing:

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 One's I devote my Song.

(ML i. 74)

Leapor's development as a writer is closely connected to her friendships with other women. During her time at Weston Hall she was evidently influenced by Susanna Jennens and her circle of relatives and acquaintances who wrote verse in the normal course of friendship. It seems that Leapor's writings later circulated in manuscript around Brackley, although not exclusively among women. The poems of her last fourteen months are, with few exceptions, directed to Bridget Freemantle: ‘'Tis to her we sing …’. The implied reader of Leapor's poems is, generally speaking, a female friend.⁴⁵ Although some poems, especially her essays, suggest that she is also looking towards a wider audience, in the vast majority of poems she speaks specifically to some woman she knows. Not all of these addresses are meant to be read by the person involved: Sophronia would have dismissed Leapor all the sooner if she had read ‘The Disappointment’ and ‘The Consolation’. Still, in an important way, Leapor's poetic voice is formed by her relations with other women. In the passage above, she makes clear that she is not interested in conventional love poetry, but in describing something closer to her actual way of life. She has taken some point made by a friend whom she names Æmilia and develops it into a full essay. Leapor's poem has its origin in conversation, so that literary creativity and friendship are in this case, as in many of her poems, inseparable. Leapor's plays have an obviously public character, yet it is interesting to observe that the second was written ‘At the Request of a Friend’ (ML ii. 225); presumably, that friend was Freemantle. It seems that the issue of friendship is significant in respect to almost every area of Leapor's writing. Moreover, she understands friendship in literary terms. She knows about misogynistic satire:

          The Wise will seldom credit all they hear,
Tho' saucy Wits shou'd tell them with a Sneer,
That Womens Friendships, like a certain Fly,
Are hatch'd i'th Morning and at Ev'ning die.
'Tis true, our Sex has been from early Time
A constant Topick for Satirick Rhyme:
Nor without Reason …

(ML i. 74)

Betty Rizzo suggests that Leapor's metaphor is a sign of her limitations as a poet; she cannot bring herself to write the simple word ‘mayfly’ (Rizzo, 338). Yet this is not the actual struggle with convention going on in these lines. Leapor, surprisingly, includes Pope among saucy wits, for the mayfly as a metaphor for women's changeable nature is taken from his ‘Epistle to a Lady’:

Rufa, whose eye quick-glancing o'er the Park,
Attracts each light gay meteor of a Spark,
Agrees as ill with Rufa studying Locke,
As Sappho's diamonds with her dirty smock,
Or Sappho at her toilet's greazy task,
With Sappho fragrant at an ev'ning Mask:
So morning Insects that in muck begun,
Shine, buzz, and fly-blow in the setting-sun.

(Pope, iii. ii. 50-2)

Pope, in a Swiftian moment, connects women's changes with dirt and, in the image of fly-blow, putrefaction. This passage, among other things, mocks a woman who reads Locke. Leapor's reference to the fly is a signal that she is arguing against Pope's Epistle.

As a woman who had apparently chosen not to marry, Leapor looked for constancy primarily in relation to friendship. She describes friendship in terms which have rather less to do with sexuality than with religion. For Leapor, friendship is ‘sacred’. Constancy is to be cultivated in the soul:

                                                                                                              we're often found,
Or lost in Passion, or in Pleasures drown'd:
And the fierce Winds that bid the Ocean roll,
Are less inconstant than a Woman's Soul:
Yet some there are who keep the mod'rate Way,
Can think an Hour, and be calm a Day:
Who ne'er were known to start into a Flame,
Turn Pale or tremble at a losing Game.
Run Chloe's Shape or Delia's Features down,
Or change Complexion at Celinda's Gown:
But still serene, compassionate and kind,
Walk through Life's Circuit with an equal Mind.

(ML i. 75)

The concept of aequa mens, a balanced spirit, is originally Stoic, and is also very Horatian; in Leapor's work, however, the idea is usually associated with resignation to the will of God. It is interesting to connect this point with her ‘An Epistle to a Lady’; as Leapor contemplates her own death, and the soul leaving the body, the last thing she wishes to see is her friend: ‘Be you the last that leaves my closing Eyes’ (ML i. 40). Friendship is seen as a spiritual comfort, steadying her spirit for its last journey.

In her ‘Essay on Friendship’ Leapor offers several characters of women to make an argument for behaviour that is temperate, honest, and cheerful. She claims that friendships should be in the same degree, and not ‘Where heavy Pomp and sullen Form withholds ❙ That chearful Ease and Sympathy of Souls’ (ML i. 77). This may tell us something about Bridget Freemantle—that she did not stand on her dignity in her friendship with the poet, even though she came from a more genteel background, and was about the age of Leapor's parents. Like Pope, Leapor finds one woman who combines all that she could hope for:

Celestial Friendship with its nicer Rules,
Frequents not Dunghills nor the Clubs of Fools.
It asks, to make this Union soft and long,
A Mind susceptible, and Judgment strong;
And then a Taste: but let that Taste be giv'n
By mighty Nature and the Stamp of Heav'n:
Possest of these, the justly temper'd Flame
Will glow incessant, and be still the same:
Not mov'd by Sorrow, Sickness, or by Age
To sullen Coldness or distemper'd Rage.
The Soul unstain'd with Envy or with Pride,
Pleas'd with itself and all the World beside,
Unmov'd can see gilt Chariots whirling by,
Or view the wretched with a melting Eye,
Discern a Failing and forgive it too:
Such, Artemisia, we may find in you.

(ML i. 77-8)

In this light, constancy in friendship is seen as a kind of grace or spiritual maturity, and inconstancy as sin. This is significant, since a weakness of nature cannot really be escaped, but sin, on the other hand, can be repented of. Although Leapor accepts that many women are guilty of inconstancy and immoderate behaviour, she none the less holds out the prospect of transformation. Whereas Pope's view of inconstancy begins in muck and ends in maggots, Leapor moves the discussion towards the higher and more generous ground of theology:

          But all have Failings, not the best are free,
Or in a greater or a less Degree.
What follows then?—Forgive, or unforgiven
Expect no Passage at the Gate of Heav'n.

(ML i. 79)

Leapor accepts part of Pope's charge against women. She provides her own examples of sudden changes in behaviour, some of which are very close to Pope's characters. Leapor describes Armida: ‘To-day more holy than a cloister'd Nun, ❙ Almost an Atheist by to-morrow's Sun’ (ML i. 78), while Pope writes of Narcissa: ‘Now Conscience chills her, and now Passion burns; ❙ And Atheism and Religion take their turns …’ (Pope, iii. ii. 55). Leapor, however, is not ultimately constrained by what Pope gives her. By seeing the failures of women as sins which may be repented of, rather than the unalterable course of nature, she advances a far more hopeful view of her sex than does Pope.

Leapor's ‘Essay on Friendship’ ends with a surprisingly modest claim: ‘our chief Task is seldom to offend, ❙ And Life's great Blessing a well-chosen Friend’ (ML i. 80). It seems that one of the great pains of Leapor's life was the lack of such friendship. Her relationship with Freemantle seems to have provided her with shelter from an often upsetting social life in Brackley. ‘The Visit’ presents an unusual picture of Mira simply defeated by ‘the scolding Dame’ and the gossips and physiognomists of Brackley:

          O Artemisia! dear to me,
As to the Lawyer golden Fee;
Whose Name dwells pleasant on my Tongue,
And first, and last, shall grace my Song;
Receive within your Friendly Door
A Wretch that vows to rove no more:
In some close Corner let me hide,
Remote from Compliments and Pride;
Where Morals grave, or Sonnets gay,
Delude the guiltless chearful Day …

(ML ii. 290)

Leapor and Freemantle spent a good deal of their time talking about poetry and religion. The word ‘guiltless’ is striking. Leapor in many places feels compelled to defend the pleasure she takes in writing poetry and reading books. In ‘The Question. Occasion'd by a Serious Admonition’, she writes:

Let me enjoy the sweet Suspence of Woe,
When Heav'n strikes me, I shall own the Blow:
Till then let me indulge one simple Hour,
Like the pleas'd Infant o'er a painted Flow'r:
Idly 'tis true: But guiltlessly the Time
Is spent in trifling with a harmless Rhyme.

(ML i. 225)

It is easy in the quest for grave scholarly judgments to forget that Leapor wrote for pleasure. As the unemployed daughter of a gardener, her luxuries were few. A woman of her station was expected to work hard. Her father and mother objected to the way she used her spare time. Her neighbours observed her, and feared ‘mopishness’; that this is even recorded implies that it was a matter of some discussion. Poems like ‘The Visit’, ‘The Epistle of Deborah Dough’, and ‘Corydon. Phillario. Or, Mira's Picture’, show that Leapor found herself talked about. In the narrow world of Brackley, this meant that she was an outsider. Her father, it should be noted, observed only one of his daughter's friends, who appears in the poetry as ‘Fidelia’ (see ML ii, p. xxx). The value Leapor places on authentic friendship arises from painful experience. When she criticizes the inconstancy of women, it is not because she is overwhelmed by Pope's influence, but because she has been, if not betrayed, at least disappointed in her friendships with other women. It is against this background of rejection that Leapor's celebrations of friendship must be understood.

Her poetry indicates that Leapor did have some friends before meeting Freemantle; Octavia, for example, respected her enough to listen to her advice, even if she probably did not accept it. Leapor often compliments other women in her poems, and two especially, ‘Song to Cloe, playing on her Spinnet’ and ‘Silvia and the Bee’, are given over to praising the beauty and the accomplishments of particular friends. In the first of these Leapor warns beaux to beware of Cloe's eyes that wound, and she goes on to describe her friend's musical skill:

          Amphion led the ravish'd Stones
(They say)—and as he'd rise or fall,
Bricks, Pebbles, Slats and Marrow-Bones
Wou'd form a Steeple or a Wall:
                    But this, you know,
                    Is long ago:
We fancy 'tis a Whim:
O had they charming Cloe heard,
They'd surely not have stir'd for him.
                    The Thracian Bard,
                    Whose Fate was hard,
(And Proserpine severe)
Had brought Eurydice back—alas!
But Cloe was not there.

(ML i. 121-2)

In ‘Silvia and the Bee’, Silvia walking among flowers is stung by a bee seeking the sweetest honey. She kills it, and Mira reproaches her in a spirit of raillery for similar treatment of two admirers, Cynthio and Amintor:

They tell you, those soft Lips may vie
          With Pinks at op'ning Day;
And yet you slew a simple Fly,
          For proving what they say.
Believe me, not a Bud like thee
          In this fair Garden blows;
Then blame no more the erring Bee,
          Who took you for the Rose.

(ML i. 273)

Both poems are somewhat conventional in their idealized descriptions of a woman's beauty captivating young men. Yet, in their way, these poems are also rather accomplished. ‘Song to Cloe, playing on her Spinnet’ especially displays a delicate touch and a complete control of form. Both poems could be read for an underlying lesbian attraction, though such an argument would be difficult to sustain, since Cloe and Silvia are both praised for their ability to win young men's affections. In the end, the poems must be read as expressions of sheer delight in friendship.

Leapor's poems inviting friends to tea are written in a similar vein of pleasure or celebration. She writes ‘To Artemisia’:

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.

(ML i. 106)

Such poems are a summons to conversation and Bohea. They are, in that respect, very ordinary; yet insofar as they represent the interior world of Leapor's friendships they are distinctive. John Stuart Mill's claim that eloquence is heard and poetry overheard can, in a sense, be applied to such poems. Although Mill may have been thinking of the Romantic poet speaking gloomily to himself, here Leapor holds out the prospect of good gossip, and the reader is set to overhear the conversation:

          What Nymph, that's eloquent and gay,
But owes it chiefly to her Tea?
With Satire that supplies our Tongues,
And greatly helps the failing Lungs.
By that assisted we can spy
A Fault with microscopick Eye;
Dissect a Prude with wond'rous Art,
And read the Care of Delia's Heart.

(ML i. 108)

In ‘The Proposal’ Leapor actually characterizes her muse in comic terms as a gossip (see ML i. 173). Patricia Meyer Spacks sees a parallel between the ‘exclusionary alliance’ which exists in gossip, and the relation between a reader and narrator in fiction: ‘what reader and narrator share is a set of responses to the private doings of richly imagined individuals’.⁴⁶ Although Spacks is mainly concerned with fiction, in Leapor's poetry a reader is often drawn into such a relationship with the poet, and into the privileged society of her closest friends.

Mary Leapor's muse is emphatically social. Although a handful of poems were written in times of solitude or loneliness, the great bulk of her poetry was written for Freemantle or for other friends. This is an important point. John Sitter writes:

By the mid-century, retirement has hardened into retreat. The poet characteristically longs to be not only far from the madding crowd, which Pope had wanted as much as Gray, but far from everybody. Accordingly, many of the poems that most reflect the 1740s and 1750s are not epistles—that is, not poems with an explicit audience and implicit social engagement—but soliloquies or lyrics, usually blank verse musings or odes addressed to personifications.⁴⁷

Whereas Sutherland describes the Augustan poet as a man at dinner with his friends, Sitter leaves the impression of the mid-century poet alone in his rooms gnawing a joint. Leapor, of course, fits neither pattern. Having been dismissed as a kitchen-maid, she harnesses her poetry to her teapot. She is an outsider, but a sociable one. She does not fly from history, yet as a woman of the labouring class there is a great deal from which she is excluded. Her poetry is addressed immediately to her friends; the reading public, the anonymous book buyer, stand somewhere outside that circle, but within earshot.

A final question is whether Leapor's view of female friendship is in some sense lesbian. There is certainly no indication of a physical relationship between Leapor and Freemantle, or with any other woman mentioned in the poems. Lillian Faderman accepts that women's relations may have been less physical in the past, but asserts that it is possible that such relations were still lesbian: ‘if by “lesbian” we mean an all-consuming emotional relationship in which two women are devoted to each other above anyone else, these ubiquitous sixteenth-, seventeenth-, eighteenth-, and nineteenth-century romantic friendships were “lesbian”’.⁴⁸ This broad definition may ultimately empty the term of meaning; one is left with a scholar pushing writers of the past through a psycho-sexual hoop. The majority of recent commentators have argued that evidence of lesbianism among eighteenth-century writers is very difficult to assess. Ruth Perry describes the problem in her biography of Mary Astell:

For one thing, intense, spiritualized friendships with other women were not unusual in that culture. … The fact is that men and women of that day inhabited separate worlds; their social rounds and domestic activities kept them in the society of their own sex much of the time. Social intercourse with those of the opposite sex was strictly regulated before marriage. As a result, there were simply more same-sex intimacies and ones of greater intensity than we are used to in our modern world, steeped as it is in post-Freudian heterosexuality.⁴⁹

Janet Todd likewise proceeds cautiously in discussing lesbianism. Female friendship is expressed in fiction and especially in letters through language in which by the mid-eighteenth century terms of ecstasy figured almost by convention: ‘female friendship represented for most women simply a rapturous sentimental union, springing perhaps from fear of male aggression or neglect but fed primarily by yearning for a partner in sensibility, a confidante in literature’.⁵⁰ Donna Landry entertains very little doubt that Leapor's poetry is basically lesbian, though the case is not argued in depth. On the basis of a reference to Sappho in ‘An Hymn to the Morning’, Landry develops the concept of Sapphic textuality:

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.

(Landry, 85)

Landry provides little evidence that the name Sappho actually had the connotation of ‘transgressive female desire’. Use of the name was, in fact, standard for female poets: in a notable instance, John Dryden used it in his ode on the death of Anne Killigrew. Her claim on this point is doubtful, to say the least. The words ‘more contentiously’ are an admission that the whole case for lesbianism is not provable; indeed, with respect to the poem she is discussing, neither Sappho nor Mira woos in any discernible way. Landry reads concealed eroticism in various female personifications, and in a landscape which, she admits, contains at least one heterosexual image. Everything really depends on the final stanza:

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.

(ML i. 25)

Sappho is invoked purely as a predecessor in women's poetry: sexual rivalry is not an issue. Landry writes of the whole poem: ‘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’ (Landry, 84). If the reference comes out of nowhere, it is by no means a promising place to begin an interpretation of Leapor's poetry.

The evidence that Leapor was a lesbian in the strict sense, as opposed to Faderman's, is slight. She did not marry; she criticized aspects of the institution of marriage; and she formed close friendships with women, one of which was particularly important. In some poems she praises the beauty and accomplishments of other women, though in a manner which foregrounds heterosexual courtship. This evidence is simply not conclusive. To borrow a term from Nina Auerbach, lesbianism is a ‘silent possibility’⁵¹ in Leapor's writing. It is more probable, however, that Leapor's female friendships followed the pattern most usual in her time, and that in Bridget Freemantle she simply found ‘a partner in sensibility, a confidante in literature’.

IMAGES OF THE FEMALE BODY

She is the daughter of a gardener, but no such elegant creature as Tennyson's Rose. She has work to do indoors and out, and her life is eminently prosaic. She has a plain face, an awkward figure, and nondescript clothes. But she has no quarrel with fate or her mirror. She seems to have been a shrewd, sensible young woman, vivacious, quickwitted, with no illusions, no sentimentality, no dreams.⁵²

Myra Reynolds's claim that Mary Leapor has no argument with her mirror just misses a useful insight about the poet. More recently, Jocelyn Harris has spoken of Leapor's ‘self-loathing’;⁵³ although this is a strong term to use, any close reading of Leapor's poetry will show that she was very sensitive about her appearance. This is a significant issue in a culture where women were taught to value themselves by their beauty. The Countess of Winchilsea describes the problem in ‘An Epilogue to the Tragedy of Jane Shore’:

There is a season, which too fast approaches,
And every list'ning beauty nearly touches;
When handsome Ladies, falling to decay,
Pass thro' new epithets to smooth the way:
From fair and young transportedly confess'd,
Dwindle to fine, well fashion'd, and well dress'd.
Thence as their fortitude's extremest proof,
To well as yet; from well to well enough;
Till having on such weak foundation stood,
Deplorably at last they sink to good.
Abandon'd then, 'tis time to be retir'd,
And seen no more, when not alas! admir'd.(54)

Amusing though this is, other women were embittered by the loss of their beauty. The most famous instance is Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, whose ‘Saturday’ eclogue describes a woman in despair over the damage smallpox has done to her face. Even late in her life, Montagu remained unable to accept her own loss of beauty. She wrote to her daughter in 1757: ‘It is eleven Year since I have seen my Figure in a Glass. The last Refflection I saw there was so disagreeable, I resolv'd to spare my selfe such mortifications for the Future, and shall continue that resolution to my Live's end.’⁵⁵ Even women who are supposedly resigned to the ordinariness of their features register a quiet complaint. Elizabeth Teft asks:

Was Nature angry when she form'd my Clay?
Or, urg'd by Haste to finish, cou'd not stay?
Or drest with all her Store some perfect she,
So lavish there, she'd none to spare for me?
I oft converse with those she's deem'd to grace
With Air and Shape, fine Mien, and charming Face:
When self-survey'd, the Glass hears this Reply,
Dear! what a strange, unpolish'd thing am I!(56)

Mirrors often appear in the poetry of women in the eighteenth century. Terry Castle suggests that for these poets the mirror was at once an emblem of the psyche and the symbol of an alternative world: ‘the mirror image both distilled a longing for purity and expressed a desire for escape’.⁵⁷ If women's lives were often painfully limited, it was possible to find or make a better self in the mirror. There, too, a woman could find plainness confirmed, or watch her beauty decay.

The tendency to judge a woman's worth, or for her to judge her own worth, by her appearance was by no means new. Roy Porter maintains, however, that in the eighteenth century the growth of fashion brought with it a new standard of beauty which emphasized the artificial, so that many Georgians feared a civilization of façades.⁵⁸ ‘Georgian values glamorized fine ladies into sex objects. Mutating from household managers into mannequins, ladies slipped into a femininity worn for the gaze of men, which had traditionally been the prerogative of actresses and whores.’⁵⁹ Women wore cosmetics that were caked and heavily coloured, so that painted faces largely obscured the natural complexion. In addition, such equipment as wigs, visors, jewels, masks, patches, lace, and gauze tended to conceal defects in appearance and tantalize at the same time. Men often believed that a woman's modesty could be judged by her ability to blush under the right circumstances. Yet under thick cosmetics this physiognomic test was no longer possible. Artificial appearance thereby takes on a sexual overtone which Porter detects in the expression ‘making faces’, meaning to have sex.⁶⁰ Keith Thomas observes that by the eighteenth century bodily control became a symbol of social hierarchy.⁶¹ An elegant person would not pass wind audibly, or expose teeth while laughing. Women's clothing was, of course, constricting, doubtless an aspect of this fashion to control the body. Stays would be tightened mercilessly to achieve the desired figure, and the image of women fainting because of overtightened stays is a commonplace in the literature of the period. Nature was forced into the correct forms. There was hardware available to straighten women's backs, necks, and shoulders. Where this involved suspension by the chin, there was risk of strangulation. As well as maintaining a good posture, women were expected to move with grace, which was the principal reason for dancing lessons.⁶² A woman attempting to achieve such perfection needed to spend a great deal of money, and so women of the labouring class were automatically excluded, even if they were possessed of ‘natural’ beauty. This highly artificial ideal can be seen, then, as an aspect both of the relations between men and women, and of the relations between classes.

Jonathan Swift's misogynistic satires often work simply by showing the difference between the physical woman and the dazzling effect created by make-up and dress. What Swift finds is, of course, the problem: ‘Who sees, will spew; who smells, be poison'd’ (Swift, ii. 583). For Swift, there is a connection between cosmetics and prostitution; the carefully assembled exterior often conceals both physical horror and moral contamination. Mary Leapor attempts to see beyond artificial appearance to what she believes is a more authentic femininity. Her poem ‘Dorinda at her Glass’ describes a faded beauty who can no longer marshal her charms. Whereas Pope's Belinda might worship her own image as an idol, Dorinda can now only grieve before the mirror:

At length the Mourner rais'd her aking Head,
And discontented left her hated Bed.
But sighing shun'd the Relicks of her Pride,
And left her Toilet for the Chimney Side:
Her careless Locks upon her Shoulders lay
Uncurl'd, alas! because they half were Gray;
No magick Baths employ her skilful Hand,
But useless Phials on her Table stand:
She slights her Form, no more by Youth inspir'd,
And loaths that Idol which she once admir'd.

(ML i. 2-3)

Not even the most elaborate cosmetics can hide Dorinda's age. She has valued herself as a beauty, and now that her looks have departed she is left with nothing:

To her lov'd Glass repair'd the weeping Maid,
And with a Sigh address'd the alter'd Shade.
Say, what art thou, that wear'st a gloomy Form,
With low'ring Forehead, like a northern Storm;
Cheeks pale and hollow, as the Face of Woe,
And Lips that with no gay Vermilion glow?

(ML i. 3)

Dorinda only knows herself by the mirror: it has literally and figuratively provided her with a self-image. Of course, without her cosmetics there is nothing alarming about Dorinda. Unlike Swift, Leapor chooses to affirm Dorinda's worth. Indeed, Dorinda now advises other women to recognize that beauty cannot be made to last, and Leapor closes the poem urging women to improve themselves spiritually so that old age will be satisfying:

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 …

(ML i. 7)

Leapor, a committed Anglican, believes that life's fundamental duties are spiritual. Worship at the shrine of beauty is a distraction from true worship. She often understands friendship as a spiritual comfort: accordingly, she advises women to pursue friendship, rather than beauty, since death is in sight: ‘To smooth my Passage to the silent Gloom, ❙ And give a Tear to grace the mournful Tomb’ (ML i. 8). By emphasizing the spiritual potential of women, Leapor believes that she has found a more reasonable and more durable standard of value.

In ‘Dorinda at her Glass’, ‘Advice to Sophronia’, and other poems, Leapor asserts that women should preserve their dignity by accepting the loss of beauty. Yet she felt her own dignity threatened by standards of beauty. In ‘The Visit’, she is distressed by comments on her appearance, and it is for this reason that she needs shelter:

Where careless Creatures, such as I,
May 'scape the penetrating Eye
Of Students in Physiognomy;
Who read your want of Wit or Grace,
Not from your Manners, but your Face;
Whose Tongues are for a Week supply'd
From one poor Mouth that's stretch'd too wide;
Who greatly blame a freckled Hand,
A skinny Arm, full Shoulders; and,
Without a Microscope, can spy
A Nose that's plac'd an Inch awry.

(ML ii. 291)

It seems that, in the view of some of her acquaintances, Leapor was simply an ugly woman. Yet the poet often sees her appearance in relation to her poverty, as one manifestation of a generally bleak and constrained way of life. In ‘The Disappointment’, she indulges a brief fantasy of being something more:

What Shadows swam before these dazled Eyes!
Fans, Laces, and Ribbands, in bright Order rise:
Methought 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.

(ML ii. 79)

Leapor dreams of escape from plainness; she dreams of being elegant, even beautiful. Of course, the promised gown is a cheat, and she is left with her old self. When she recounts her dismissal from Edgcote House in ‘An Epistle to Artemisia. On Fame’, she is criticized by Parthenia for her dirty shoes and by Sophronia for her posture: ‘“Still o'er a Table leans your bending Neck: ❙ Your Head will grow prepost'rous, like a Peck’ (ML ii. 52). When the Gentleman's Magazine published the remarks of a former employer on Mary Leapor, much was made of the length of her neck and the shortness of her body. Leapor, a poor woman, could not dress to advantage; indeed, her employers' low regard for her as a servant is partly related to her appearance. Her shoes, posture, and proportions have a strange economic significance, since they all seem to have been factors in her dismissal. In ‘The Mistaken Lover’ Strephon attacks his wife's appearance to cover his actual greed. It may be that the spectacle of an intellectually ambitious kitchen-maid unnerved her employers, and that she posed a threat to their view of a proper social order. In a world where physiognomy was a respected practice, Leapor's appearance may have given the Chauncys grounds to believe that she really was a person of no significance and that she ought to learn her station.

Leapor's most telling examination of standards of beauty is ‘Corydon. Phillario. Or, Mira's Picture’. In her letter Freemantle expresses concern that this poem will be misunderstood:

I think it may give the Reader a worse Idea of her Person than it deserv'd, which was very far from being shocking; tho' there was nothing extraordinary in it. The Poem was occasioned by her happening to hear that a Gentleman who had seen some of her Poems, wanted to know what her Person was.

(ML ii, p. xxxii)

This seems quaint, but at least one scholar has expressed confusion over whether this Mira is a real person.⁶³ To know the occasion of the poem is helpful in any case, since it allows the reader to see that not only is Leapor making a burlesque of her own appearance but satirizing the gentleman as well, and, in a broad sense, the male gaze. Corydon is a shepherd, and Phillario is a sophisticated man accustomed to polite society. The two are walking amid flowers and birds, and Phillario asks about the local beauties: ‘What Nymph, O Shepherd! reigns ❙ The rural Toast of these delightful Plains?’ Phillario mentions several women who are admired variously for graceful ease, inspiring eyes, a charming voice, a fair face, or raven hair. Phillario, however, is startled by the sight of Mira:

But who is she that walks from yonder Hill,
With studious Brows, and Night-cap Dishabille?
That looks a Stranger to the Beams of Day;
And counts her Steps, and mutters all the Way?

(ML ii. 295-6)

Presumably Mira is composing a poem, counting the syllables as she walks. The gentleman who was impressed by Leapor's poems has given her an occasion to debunk any notion that intellectual or personal worth can be judged from physical appearance. In ‘The Mistaken Lover’ Leapor shows Strephon feebly criticizing his wife's appearance; in this poem she goes much further by asserting that she herself is an ugly woman, a slattern, and almost dares the gentleman to stand by his favourable opinion of her intelligence. When Corydon asks Phillario if he likes Mira, the response is unmistakable:

Like her!—I'd rather beg the friendly Rains
To sweep that Nuisance from thy loaded Plains;
That—
CORYDON.
—Hold, Phillario! She's a Neighbour's Child:
'Tis true, her Linen may be something soil'd.
PHILLARIO.
Her Linen, Corydon!—herself, you mean.
Are such the Dryads of thy smiling Plain?

(ML ii. 296)

Twentieth-century readers may think of the eighteenth century as a time when dirt was everywhere and personal hygiene abysmal. Indeed, that would appear to be the origin of Swift's excremental vision. Johnson's famous comment about Kit Smart suggests that some people were actually content with their dirt: ‘Another charge was, that he did not love clean linen; and I have no passion for it.’⁶⁴ Yet, by the eighteenth century, polite culture made much of personal cleanliness. In one conduct manual, we read: ‘Cleanliness is a mark of politeness: and it is universally agreed upon, that no one, unadorned with this virtue, can go into company without being offensive. Besides, the easier or higher any one's fortune is, this duty rises in proportion.’⁶⁵ Hygiene becomes a matter of social distinction: polite people always wear clean linen. In her self-portrait Leapor is intent on flouting almost every aspect of contemporary standards of beauty. Moreover, she is willing to connect her poor appearance with her interest in literature. Corydon, speaking as well as he can in Mira's defence, observes:

Her Eyes are dim, you'll say: Why, that is true:
I've heard the Reason, and I'll tell it you.
By a Rush-Candle (as her Father says)
She sits whole Ev'nings, reading wicked Plays.

(ML ii. 297)

It seems that a literary woman of Leapor's class can only read by night: there are simply too many things to be done during the day. The poems which impressed the gentleman could only have been produced by a poet with rings around her eyes. If women are to be judged by their appearance, Mira ought to give up books:

PHILLARIO.
She read!—She'd better milk her brindled Cows:
I wish the Candle does not singe her Brows,
So like a dry Furze-faggot; and, beside,
Not quite so even as a Mouse's Hide.

(ML ii. 297)

Phillario goes on to denounce Mira's shape as so many mountains, and then looks into her mouth:

CORYDON.
But she has teeth—
PHILLARIO.
                              —Consid'ring how they grow,
'Tis no great matter if she has or no:
They look decay'd with Posset, and with Plumbs,
And seem prepar'd to quit her swelling Gums.

(ML ii. 298)

Although eighteenth-century cooking tended to use a great deal of sugar, women were expected to keep their teeth in repair. John Breval writes in The Art of Dress (1717):

          Take, gentle Creatures, take a Friend's Advice,
In polishing your Teeth be wond'rous nice;
For no Defect in these (should such be known)
Ten Thousand other Graces will attone;
Oft let the Brush it's Morning Task repeat;
And shun at Boards the too high-season'd Meat;
Ragouts, and luscious Soups, make Teeth decay,
And op'ning Lips the tainted Breath betray.(66)

Roy Porter suggests that the reasoning behind Chesterfield's advice to his son never to laugh was that laughter might reveal rotten teeth.⁶⁷ Bad teeth, like other unpleasant aspects of the body, ought to be concealed or controlled.

Such principles of fashion, of course, applied above all to women. Insofar as Leapor presents herself as genuinely ugly, she has a chance to confound the gentleman's expectation that a gifted writer will also have a charming appearance. As Margaret Anne Doody puts it: ‘Leapor plays with the fascination of female ugliness in such a manner as to free herself from conventional claims of feminine proprieties.’⁶⁸ By emphasizing every defect in her body, she offers a challenge to polite culture. Whereas women are expected to conceal or control whatever defects their bodies may have, Leapor puts hers on display, and even amplifies them. This is a procedure like Swift's, except that Leapor is staking her claim to real dignity; she asserts that she does not wish to be valued for beauty, but for her wit and, as we glean from other poems, her morals. Maximilian Novak speaks of the eighteenth century as the ‘Age of Disguise’, and Terry Castle treats the masquerade as a central metaphor of eighteenth-century culture.⁶⁹ Leapor adamantly refuses to conceal herself. She insists on a dignity which has nothing to do with appearances. Bold though it is, Leapor's poem is remarkably pessimistic. Mira cannot enter Phillario's world on the strength of her intellect, because her features are too plain; although Corydon will not attack her appearance, he has no appreciation of her intellect since he believes that plays are wicked. The poem has an oddly sinister ending:

CORYDON.
No more, my Friend! for see, the Sun grows high,
And I must send the Weeders to my Rye:
Those spurious Plants must from the Soil be torn,
Lest the rude Brambles over-top the Corn.

(ML ii. 298)

Phillario has already wished that the rain would sweep Mira away, and now Corydon is intent on getting rid of weeds. Presumably Mira is such a ‘spurious plant’, unwelcome, and best plucked out. The poem is a counter-pastoral, and its underlying vision is of disharmony. As in ‘An Essay on Woman’, Leapor raises her protest but can see no escape from her situation. In ‘Mira's Picture’ she is caught between classes and between standards of value: both Corydon and Phillario judge her to be worthless.

Margaret Anne Doody claims that eighteenth-century poetry is incarnational, not merely because it deals in particulars, ‘but also because it celebrates, however ruefully, the experience of living a bodily and historical life’.⁷⁰ How much of eighteenth-century poetry can be accounted for by this term is arguable, yet the idea is certainly useful with respect to Mary Leapor. Doody believes that interest in incarnation can lead to an ‘ironic self-awareness of the gap between that cultural icon, the beautiful female, and the strange physical self’.⁷¹ Leapor's poetry can certainly be very physical, as in ‘Mira's Picture’. She is aware of women's bodies. A classic instance of this is ‘The Head-Ach’, in which she humorously compares her own writing of poetry with a friend's gossip. Both are crimes for which they are punished in the natural course of things:

          Just so, Aurelia, you complain
Of Vapours, Rheums, and gouty Pain;
Yet I am patient, so shou'd you,
For Cramps and Head-achs are our due:
We suffer justly for our Crimes;
For Scandal you, and I for Rhymes …

(ML i. 102)

Leapor finds in her menstrual pains a bond with Aurelia, even if the poem is largely a gentle rebuke to her friend for malicious talk. In a very light-hearted manner, she connects her poetry with women's friendship, and with women's physical experience.

In Doody's view, women poets of the eighteenth century are often very conscious of dirt. In this, again, they resemble Swift, though they rarely share his horrified fascination. An awareness of dirt can often be detected in women's descriptions of their environment. Esther Lewis describes a stroll during the winter:

Exalted now on iron stilts I move,
Through dirt with cane supported fearless rove,
Till rooted deep upon the yielding plain,
A breathing monument awhile remain,
To warn each wand'ring she my fate to shun,
Nor such defiling dirty hazards run.(72)

Doody's notion of incarnation in poetry really does not account for the hundreds of poems written by women to the standard abstractions such as sleep, pity, and wisdom, yet there is certainly a strain in the poetry of eighteenth-century women which might take as its best emblem Esther Lewis perched on her stilts. Mary Leapor, too, knows that she lives in a dirty world. Her house, for example, would probably have had a clay floor, and if its lighting was primarily from rushes, it would have been dingy. As a gardener's daughter she would have been accustomed to muddy boots and black finger-nails. In ‘The Pocket-Book's Petition to Parthenissa’, the book begs Parthenissa to write something on one of its pages, after which it will be content: ‘Nor once, repining at my Cell, ❙ With Darkness, Dirt, and Mira, dwell’ (ML ii. 94). In ‘An Epistle to a Lady’ Leapor indicates that in her house there is no hope of keeping things clean:

Convinc'd too soon, her Eye unwilling falls
On the blue Curtains and the dusty Walls:
She wakes, alas! to Business and to Woes,
To sweep her Kitchen, and to mend her Clothes.

(ML i. 39)

‘An Epistle to a Lady’ is Leapor's most poignant meditation on death. … She ponders her body's fragility, her intellectual struggles, the poverty and drabness of her environment, and her need for friendship; the poem ends with thoughts of the world to come. Apart from Doody's specific use of the word, ‘incarnation’ is a theological term describing the divinization of history and the material order. The paradox in Leapor's response to her experience is that she is firmly aware of its physical nature, yet she also insists on the intellectual and spiritual dignity of women. Leapor's poetry strives towards a vision of wholeness. Her protest is, in that sense, rooted in orthodoxy.

PRIMITIVISM AND EDUCATION

The cult of the primitive in eighteenth-century England had numerous manifestations: the Gothic fashion in literature, architecture, and landscape; ballad collecting, archaeology, and other forms of antiquarianism; an interest in undeveloped societies such as those of the South Sea Islanders, the American Indians, and the Eskimos; the peculiar fascination with people who had lived outside normal society, such as Peter the Wild Boy, who was found in a wood near Hanover and learned no more than a score of words in his lifetime, or Mlle Le Blanc, who was captured near the Marne living in a tree;⁷³ and, of course, Lord Monboddo's quest for a human being with a tail.

Oddities notwithstanding, this cult contributed substantially to the development of new attitudes towards originality, nature, and emotion in literature. Although the gap between primitivist theory and actual literary practice was great, it became possible through claims of natural genius for labouring-class poets to command the interest of readers and critics of a higher class. Such claims, of course, usually distorted and, in some cases, entirely misrepresented, the efforts of these poets. … Mary Leapor's education, though haphazard and incomplete, was considerably greater than was admitted at the time of her publication. To describe her as a primitive or a natural genius is, in the final analysis, a mistake.

The primitive poet was thought to compose directly from nature, hence spontaneously, artlessly, and without forethought either of design or of audience.⁷⁴ The primitive poet was therefore unencumbered by tradition or textuality. Such a talent was already complete and could undergo no education or development. William Duff writes in An Essay on Original Genius (1767):

The truth is, a Poet of original Genius has very little occasion for the weak aid of Literature: he is self-taught. He comes into the world as it were completely accomplished. Nature supplies the materials of his compositions; his senses are the under-workmen, while Imagination, like a masterly Architect, superintends and directs the whole.⁷⁵

That a natural poet had no need of books was a common claim. One critic, Thomas Blackwell, went so far as to argue that in the case of poets like Homer or Hesiod, the fewer books read the better. Blackwell's An Enquiry into the Life and Writings of Homer (1735) gives a fascinating description of the qualities associated with natural poetry:

But what marvellous Things happen in a well ordered State? We can hardly be surprized; We know the Springs and Method of acting; Every things happens in Order, and according to Custom or Law. But in a wide Country, not under a regular Government, or split into many, whose Inhabitants live scattered, and ignorant of Laws and Discipline; In such a Country, the Manners are simple, and Accidents will happen every Day: Exposition and loss of Infants, Encounters, Escapes, Rescues, and every other thing that can inflame the human Passions while acting, or awake them when described, and recalled by Imitation.⁷⁶

Blackwell appears well insulated from the violence of his own time. The England which produced Moll Flanders or even The Dunciad ought to have satisfied any desire for extreme experience. A self-congratulating sense of modernity is fairly common in the early eighteenth century; what is thought lacking in emotional, cultural, and artistic experience is attributed to an expertise in living. René Wellek identifies among critics of the time a biological or organic view of history, according to which humanity develops from the childhood of earlier times to eventual old age and death.⁷⁷ According to such a view, the vigour of ancient times has given way to a less exuberant though more orderly and mature way of life. A writer such as Blackwell seems, on the one hand, ideologically assured about his own society: ‘We know the Springs and Method of Acting’. On the other hand, he recognizes a narrowness and constraint in that culture.

Theories of primitivism, it could be argued, allowed writers, thinkers, and artists to deal with problems of disorder without seriously questioning their society. Primitivism explained and even sentimentalized those who lacked education or economic security. As with the pastoral myth, it could either obscure or bring into focus problems of social disadvantage. Even in its most blinkered forms, however, primitivism concentrated attention on people outside the élite, and made possible in some quarters a gradual increase in understanding.

The idea of inspired poets had a venerable history, but the primitivists of the eighteenth century were keen to find contemporary instances of natural genius. The great model in English was Shakespeare warbling ‘his native wood-notes wild’. In 1767 Richard Farmer produced An Essay on the Learning of Shakespeare, by which he hoped to see the poet ‘acquitted … of all piratical depredations on the Ancients: … his Studies were most demonstratively confined to Nature and his own Language’.⁷⁸ Mrs Montagu, who along with Hannah More later promoted Ann Yearsley, wrote of Shakespeare in 1769: ‘Heaven-born genius acts from something superior to rules, and antecedent to rules; and has a right of appeal to nature herself.’⁷⁹ Even where commentators avoid comparisons with Shakespeare and are generally more restrained, interest in a primitive poetic impulse is sometimes intense. Mark Akenside writes in The Pleasures of the Imagination:

                                                                                                                        Ask the swain
Who journeys homeward from a summer day's
Long labour, why, forgetful of his toils
And due repose, he loiters to behold
The sunshine gleaming as thro' amber clouds,
O'er all the western sky; full soon, I ween,
His rude expression and untutor'd airs,
Beyond the pow'r of language, will unfold
The form of beauty smiling at his heart.(80)

Akenside hopes for great poetry from labourers, though he also sees a need for raw talent to be improved by culture. In view of such expectations, labouring poets were able to present themselves, or, at least, be presented to the public as natural geniuses.

Some labouring poets understood their own work in primitivist terms. Ann Yearsley writes ‘To Mr. ****, an Unlettered Poet, on Genius Unimproved’:

Florus, canst thou define that innate spark
Which blazes but for glory? Canst thou paint
The trembling rapture in its infant dawn,
Ere young Ideas spring; to local Thought
Arrange the busy phantoms of the mind,
And drag the distant timid shadows forth,
Which, still retiring, glide unform'd away,
Nor rush into expression? No; the pen,
Tho' dipp'd in awful Wisdom's deepest tint,
Can never paint the wild extatic mood.(81)

There is something strange about one supposedly natural poet writing to another in epistemological terms. It is difficult to believe that Yearsley has produced this self-conscious poem purely through inspiration rather than as a result of reading contemporary authors chosen by Hannah More. Yearsley wishes to appear learned, even as she boasts of the ‘extatic mood’. James Woodhouse recalled with some resentment the role of natural genius:

As tutor'd Bears are led from place, to place,
Displaying biped gait, and burlesque grace;
Their action clumsey, and their shape uncouth,
While grunting bagpipe greets the gaping youth;
And, with most solemn phiz, and upright air,
Make witlings titter, whilst the ignorant stare—
As dancing Dogs make Oafs and Children, swarm;
Dress—mien—demeanour—all in human form—
As Monkeys, rear'd erect, on paws, or breech,
Well mimic Man in all but laugh, and speech—
Or as, from street to street, queer Camel's shown,
From other beasts, by pipe and tabor, known;
Tho' seldom eye perceives a bungling brute
Whose make, and motion, less with music suit;
So was he sent the twofold City through,
For Cits, like Swains, are pleas'd with something new,
That each Subscriber's eyes might freely range,
O'er Clown, so clever! Spectacle, so strange!(82)

That an intelligent labouring person should be portrayed as a prodigy or a marvel is plain snobbery, yet it was a necessary part of the subscription process for the poet to face this humiliation. The primitivist movement increased the chances of publication for a poet of the labouring class, but it also obliged such a poet to assume a public identity which was not only humiliating but often deceptive.

Not all critics believed primitivist ideas. Samuel Johnson's amusing treatment of the subject in Chapter XXII of Rasselas is well known. Lord Kames in his Elements of Criticism (1762) argues for a universal standard of taste; however, he excludes from true taste the people for whom other commentators claimed natural genius: ‘Those who depend for food on bodily labour, are totally void of taste; of such a taste at least as can be of use in the fine arts.’⁸³ Thus, the pose of natural genius, even where it was assumed without deceit, was likely to impress only a part of the literary establishment.

Mary Leapor made it plain that she did not wish to be described in the subscription proposal, since that would excite the world's curiosity rather than its good nature (ML ii. 314). When that proposal appeared after her death there was strong emphasis on the defects in her education:

[She] had no other Education than in common with those of her own Station; could borrow no Helps from the Converse of her Country Companions; yet, by the Strength of her own Parts, the Vivacity of her own Genius, and a perpetual Pursuit after Knowledge, not only acquired a Taste for the most exalted and refined Authors in our Language, but aspired to imitate 'em.⁸⁴

There is no deception here, except perhaps on the point of her ‘Country Companions’. Evidently, this term refers to acquaintances of her own class, and not to the Jennens family or Bridget Freemantle from whose converse she certainly borrowed helps. The proposal, however, indicates that she read something beyond Alexander Pope and the Bible, for it combines a primitivist appeal to genius with an assertion that her natural parts had been improved by a knowledge of the best writers. Joseph Spence had provided Stephen Duck with a reading list of good authors, as Shenstone was to do for Woodhouse, and More for Yearsley. It seems that, despite the more extreme theoretical claims concerning natural genius, few of those who promoted such geniuses actually subscribed to a pure primitivism. It was common to attempt some reconciliation of those theories with a more neo-classical conception of literature. Nonetheless, the note to Leapor's first volume attempts to minimize her reading: ‘Mrs. Leapor from a Child delighted in reading, and particularly Poetry, but had few Opportunities of procuring any Books of that kind’ (ML i. 3). Freemantle compounds this impression when she observes that Leapor's whole library consisted of sixteen or seventeen volumes (ML ii, p. xxxii). In 1754 John Duncombe, though not an extreme primitivist, provided the obligatory comparison between Leapor, the natural poet, and Shakespeare, in his Feminiad.⁸⁵ In his letter to the Gentleman's Magazine, he implied the same comparison: ‘Molly Leapor … was a most extraordinary uncultivated genius, who “warbled her native wood-notes wild”.’ As apologists for her work, Freemantle, Duncombe, and, to a lesser degree, the author of the proposals (presumably Garrick), portray Leapor in terms which minimize her opportunities of learning. This, obviously, is not a literary fraud on the scale of the ‘Rowley’ poems or Ossian, yet it is a distortion that must be corrected.

That Mary Leapor had few of the characteristics of the natural poet envisaged by literary theorists of the day is certain. Betty Rizzo argues this point vigorously:

But the truth about Leapor is that though she was different from those educated poets suffering from the anxiety Bate expresses as ‘What is there left to do?’ the difference is not what the public supposed. In fact, Leapor, like the other primitives, knew exactly what was left to do: she had to catch up, make up for lost time, follow Pope and learn to write like him. She was overwhelmed with an anxiety, not the anxiety of influence but the anxiety for influence.

(Rizzo, 332)

This point is absolutely essential for an understanding of Leapor. From ‘To Lucinda’, ‘Mopsus’, and ‘A Summer's Wish’, Rizzo demonstrates that Leapor was unhappy with her lack of education, and that she used her poetry to moderate her ambitions and her emotional excesses. Rizzo's argument opens another issue that is crucial to Leapor's poetry: whereas Leapor is a formidable social critic, she none the less affirms many of the central values of her culture. As an intellectual, she recognized that Pope, Swift, Gay, Addison, Steele, and other leading writers of her time embodied a tradition of learning. Her attitude towards that tradition was fundamentally respectful. She wished to put on the mind of her culture, and that could only be achieved by extensive reading.

There is an aspect of Leapor's poetry that Rizzo overlooks. Following Freemantle, Duncombe, and others, Rizzo asserts that ‘she was probably as primitive a poet as one could find: uneducated, without free access to many books, without much conversation, consigned to a station designed to be unacquainted with such things’ (Rizzo, 338). From ‘Epistle to Artemisia. On Fame’, it is evident that Leapor knew a number of aspiring poets, and discussed writing with them. The folder of manuscript poems preserved at Weston Hall only confirms the internal evidence that she was not deprived of literary acquaintances, even if their attainments were limited. More importantly, there is a large number of references in her poetry to books she has read. Indeed, there is solid internal evidence, supported by some small pieces of external evidence, that Leapor had read some works of classical literature, and many contemporary authors.

Bridget Freemantle's letter contains a curious defence of Leapor's originality:

Since the Publication of her Poems, I hear she has been accused of stealing from other Authors; but I believe very unjustly, and imagine the Censure proceeds rather from a random Conjecture that it must be so, than any just Foundation. I don't find that the Particulars are pointed out; and if there are really any Lines in her Book that bear so near a Resemblance to what has been wrote by other Authors, as to give room for such a Conjecture, I, that was so well acquainted with her Way of Thinking, dare venture to answer for her, that it proceeded from the Impression the Reading those Passages some time before happen'd to make upon her Mind, without her remembring from whence they came; and therefore she can no more be reckon'd a Plagiary on that Account, than a Person could justly be accused of being a Thief, for making use of a Shilling or two of another's Money that happen'd to be mix'd with his own, without his knowing it.

Besides, I don't believe it impossible for two People to think exactly alike upon a Subject, and even to express themselves almost in the very same Words for a Line or two, without ever having been acquainted with one another's Thoughts; tho' I don't know that this was the Case of Myra.

(ML ii, pp. xxiii-xxiv)

Freemantle takes the charge of plagiarism seriously. It was, of course, a common occurrence in the eighteenth century for a new author to be accused of some imposture. Indeed, according to Janet Todd, women writers were the particular object of this kind of scepticism.⁸⁶ Many women produced poems defending themselves against the charge that they could not have written their own works. Mary Masters, for example, attempted to answer doubts about a psalm she had versified:

But still the Poem, howsoe'er design'd,
Is a true Picture of the Author's Mind.
Whate'er I write, whatever I impart,
Is simple Nature unimprov'd by Art.
Search but those Strains, you think so much excel,
Scan ev'ry Verse, and try the Numbers well:
You'll plainly see, in almost ev'ry Line,
Distinguishing Defects to prove them Mine.(87)

Masters often apologizes for her incapacity as a poet. Here she gives voice to a sense of inferiority underlying the work of many natural poets. She claims that the poem must be hers since it is basically incompetent.

The accusation of plagiarism against Leapor should not be dismissed out of hand. Whoever made the charge was probably aware of the number of echoes and allusions in her writing. To describe this as plagiarism is, as Freemantle observes, unjust. Leapor often refers to major writers in order to disagree with them. Moreover, it is a long-established strategy among poets to rework passages by other authors. What Leapor borrows she usually changes. She does little for which she could not have found a sanction in Pope's ‘An Essay on Criticism’. Nevertheless, the accusation is interesting since it suggests that some readers found Leapor's credentials as a natural poet or original genius suspect even at the time of publication. Defending Leapor, Freemantle implies that the poet read widely enough to forget where particular lines or passages came from. Had Leapor lived and allowed herself to be described as an original genius, she might have faced the sort of embarrassment that overtook Burns as the extent of his reading became known. In ‘To Lucinda’ she does in fact assume the role of the uncultivated poet; therefore, her humility about her education could easily have been taken as an attempt to deceive, even if that was not her intention. Given what now seems the fragility of primitivist thinking, it is surprising that there were not even more scandals associated with the movement.

LEAPOR'S EDUCATION AND READING

To assess Leapor's early education is difficult. It is probable, as Betty Rizzo observes, that she attended the school in Brackley run by a Mr Cooper (Rizzo, 314-15), that is, the Magdalen Free School. This establishment may have resembled the one attended by Mopsus: ‘His father plac'd him in a Country School, ❙ To learn Division, and the Golden Rule …’ (ML ii. 11). Victor E. Neuburg describes a typical school in the eighteenth century: ‘For the children of the poor who could pay a trifling weekly fee, some sort of education could be acquired at the random, private-venture establishments set up by, perhaps, a “dame” or an old soldier—almost anyone, in fact, who was unsuccessful or incapable in any other sphere of activity.’⁸⁸ A private-venture school would have followed the same method as the charity schools in which, according to M. G. Jones, children were taught first to read and later to write; they were taught arithmetic only when the other skills had been perfected.⁸⁹ Keith Thomas argues that even in the eighteenth century it was not uncommon for people to read print, sometimes only black letter, without learning to write.⁹⁰ Leapor herself had poor handwriting, probably as a result of this emphasis on teaching students above all to read. Richard Cooper was, however, an able and committed teacher (Clarke, 146-7). Leapor was doubtless better than most pupils. It is conceivable that she received extra attention. Cooper was not only a teacher but a bookbinder, and may have allowed her to read the books in his possession. Her interest in the law, a point which will be returned to, may also have originated with him, since he supplemented his income by taking wills (Eland, ii. 288).

Cooper did not run the only school in Brackley. There was also the public school run by Magdalen College, Oxford, and a small academy operated by the vicar, Thomas Bowles. Betty Rizzo considers the possibility that Elizabeth Lisle Bowles, the vicar's wife, took an interest in Mary Leapor (Rizzo, 322). A close connection between Leapor and the Bowles family would be particularly interesting with respect to her education. One of the vicar's main scholarly projects was to replace Lily's Latin grammar, which had been in use since 1548: ‘that the Roman Dialect may be no longer the slow and ungrateful Production of Force, Drudgery, and servile Punishments, the long-prevailing Obscurities of former Ages are clear'd’.⁹¹ Bowles appears a humane teacher. The first edition of his grammar, A Compendious and Rational Institution of the Latin Tongue, was published in 1740. Since Leapor would have seen Bowles at least every Sunday, it is hard to imagine that she would not have known he had published this book, or that she would not have gone out of her way to obtain a copy and read it. If she was a friend, or even a protégée, of Elizabeth Lisle Bowles, then she would certainly have read the book.

There is not much evidence that Leapor actually learned Latin. As Betty Rizzo argues, however, she did feel the need to catch up, to fill the gaps in her learning. That she did not know Latin or Greek would have seemed an important gap, as Chesterfield wrote to his son: ‘the word illiterate in its common acceptation means a man who is ignorant of those two languages’.⁹² Whether Leapor learned Latin or, as is likely, read the major authors in translation, Bowles's grammar would have been an excellent guide. At the end of the volume there is a short, lucid essay on each important Roman author. For example, he writes of Virgil:

His Pastorals describe that innocent Simplicity which was the Blessing of the first Ages of the World, and which he has supported by rural Scenes, Songs and Music, Omens of Birds, Comparisons, and all such Ideas as are common to a pastoral Life. His Georgics reconcile the most lively and ornamental Parts of Poetry with the Simplicity of the plain and common Precepts of Agriculture; and not only instruct in rural Affairs, but furnish the attentive Mind with many excellent Improvements in Arts and Sciences. Industry and Sobriety, the Love of one's Country, and a Religious Frame of Mind, are every where inculcated …⁹³

What Edmund Blunden calls Leapor's sense of completeness of form when she varies from the standard couplet may owe something to Bowles's book, since it also contains chapters on versification and scanning. The grammar is, however, a very brief affair, and it is most likely that it would have provided Leapor with no more than a smattering of Latin, and an over-view of the literature.

Leapor's reading of the classics cannot have been systematic. For example, she writes to Bridget Freemantle about her preference for the Apocrypha, especially the prayer of Manasses, over some classical authors:

The style is pleasant, and has something in it of modern Eloquence; and those agreeable Repetitions awaken the Readers Attention, and leave a pleasing Anguish on the Mind. In the Whole, it is the perfect Picture of a wounded Soul: And Manasses in his Chains and Afflictions, is a greater Favourite of mine, than all the Caesars, Cicero, or Cato himself.

I would beg of you, if you please, to send me the rest of the Odyssey; for I long to know the End of the Fable; and I have Leisure To-day from dirty Work.

(ML ii. 320)

Although it is remarkable that by the last year of her life Leapor had not yet read through Homer, this letter suggests that she was indeed accustomed to wide reading. Freemantle appears to have been worried that she would borrow time from her other responsibilities to read Homer. A letter that follows the one quoted above, and was probably written on the same day, though the two are separated by the editor or printer, responds to Freemantle's misgivings: ‘I thank you for your kind Admonition: Yet I believe you mistook my Intention; which was not to meditate upon Homer, but, out of an excessive Curiosity (peculiar to my Temper), to know the latter End; tho' I intend to read and digest him at a more proper time’ (ML ii. 313).

This letter reveals something of Freemantle's position regarding the poet. On the one hand, she supplies books and encourages her friend's intellectual development. On the other hand, she is intent that Leapor should fulfil her obligations. Other references suggest that these letters were written around August 1746, the busiest month for farmers and their families. It is likely that Freemantle did not wish to be the cause of the poet annoying her father. A basic point confirmed by these letters is that Leapor was able to borrow books from Freemantle. It appears that she had read the Iliad some time earlier, for there are several brief references to that epic in her poetry. The most substantial occurs in ‘Soto’, a character of a drunk. Soto disgorges two gallons of beer and falls asleep:

Down drops the Youth, his giddy Head
Falls easy on the liquid Bed:
So swam Achilles fierce and brave,
On angry Xanthus's swelling Wave;
And 'scap'd with being wet to th' Skin;
For Pallas held him up by th' Chin:
So Bacchus saves, by mighty Charms,
His helpless Devotee from Harms …

(ML i. 177)

Roger Lonsdale notes that these lines allude to the eleventh book of the Iliad (ECWP, 526 n).

Homer was not the only Greek poet whom Leapor read. In the last stanza of ‘An Hymn to the Morning’ there is, of course, the reference to Sappho's sweeter song (ML i. 25). Leapor might have encountered some of Sappho's verse in several translations. Pope's version of ‘Sappho to Phaon’ is a strong possibility. Ambrose Philips also translated some of Sappho's poems, and his version of ‘A Hymn to Venus’ appeared in The Spectator, no. 223, while no. 229 compared translations of the ‘Ode to Lesbia’, by Catullus, Boileau, and Philips. Edmund Blunden sees in ‘The Month of August’ evidence that Leapor may have read Theocritus, perhaps in ‘the hearty, homely translation by Creech’.⁹⁴ While there are no direct references to Theocritus, and no obvious allusions or echoes in Leapor's text, there are enough similarities in tone for Blunden's observation to be at least plausible.

Leapor alludes to Roman poets in several places. In ‘The Proclamation of Apollo’ she describes a feast which makes repast of Homer's song, and ‘Next Virgil on the Table Shines, ❙ And then smooth Ovid's tender Lines’ (ML i. 46). There is another reference to Virgil in ‘An Epistle to Artemisia. On Fame’. Leapor alludes to the personification of fame in the fourth book of the Aeneid:

          Bold Maro paints her of gigantic Size,
And makes her Forehead prop the lofty Skies;
With Eyes and Ears he hung the Lady round,
And her shrill Clarion shook the Heavens around …

(ML ii. 43)

Leapor probably knew Ovid and Virgil from a volume of Dryden's translations (1701) in the library at Weston Hall. She refers to one other Roman poet, albeit indirectly: ‘Upon her Play being returned to her, stained with Claret’ is based on Horace's familiar poem ‘To his Book’. There was, of course, a long tradition of poets addressing their books in the manner of Horace, and it cannot be assumed that she had actually read this or any other of Horace's works. As a reader of Alexander Pope, however, she must have known something about Horace. Her own interest in the epistle form if not a result of reading Horace, would surely have led her to seek out this author.

Leapor shows some knowledge of classical prose writers. In ‘An Imperfect Scene’, which was to be included in The Unhappy Father, Lucy describes how Lycander took advantage of her: ‘He first seduc'd me from my native Home, ❙ With Vows of Friendship, and Platonic Love …’ (ML ii. 223). In ‘The Mistaken Lover’, the story of deception in love is seen as a lesson for young men and women:

‘'Twill help to make our Strephons wise,
And stop the Growth of tender Lies:
And more than Plato's moral Page
Instruct the Celia's of the Age.’

(ML i. 89)

In the letter quoted above, Leapor mentions three Roman prose writers whom she has read. The standard translation of Caesar's writings at the time was that of Martin Bladen.⁹⁵ Cicero's works could be had in a number of translations. Cato the Censor's writings, however, were not widely available in translation, and Leapor may only be referring to Addison's play about Cato of Utica. In ‘The Sow and the Peacock’ she humorously describes the intellectual attainments of the pig: ‘Philosophy she had good Store, ❙ Had ponder'd Seneca all o'er …’ (ML i. 180). Her knowledge of Seneca probably came from Roger L'Estrange's book, Seneca's Morals By Way of Abstract & Discourse, a volume which is in the library of Weston Hall.

Leapor's knowledge of the classics was probably patchy, at best. Discounting the possibility that she knew Latin or, even less likely, Greek, her experience of classical writers would have been filtered through the sensibilities of their translators, and reworked according to contemporary tastes in literature. Indeed, a very significant part of what she read would have been translated by Pope, Dryden, and, to a lesser extent, Philips, authors whose English works were among the main influences on her own verse. Her reading of the classics may not have provided a sharp contrast to the literature of her own time. Still, her reading was not necessarily limited to those authors mentioned in her poems. The library at Weston Hall contains English versions of Josephus, Plutarch, Juvenal, and Lucretius, which Leapor may have read even though she makes no allusion to them in her poetry. She may have wanted to make a show of erudition in her poetry, but she probably did not drop every name she knew.

Leapor's knowledge of English writers is much wider than her knowledge of the classics, as we would expect. Here, again, it is possible to trace a pattern of allusions and echoes. Her reading concentrated on authors from the Restoration to her own time, doubtless because these books were more easily obtained than earlier ones. There are, naturally, references to Chaucer and Shakespeare. ‘The Fox and the Hen’ is a rewriting of ‘The Nun's Priest's Tale’, complete with a fox named Reynard and a hen called Partlet (ML i. 97-100). There is also a reference to Chanticleer in ‘Mopsus’ (ML ii. 24). It is likely that Leapor knew this tale from the translation by Dryden at Weston Hall, although she may simply have read it from a chap-book. If this is so, she seems aware also of the antiquity of the tale. The hen addresses the fox:

‘From long ago, (or Record lies)
You Foxes have been counted wise:
But sure this Story don't agree
With your Device of eating me.’

(ML i. 99)

Leapor knows that Reynard's hen-house depredations have been going on for a very long time.

She may have read a great deal of Shakespeare. The Unhappy Father, for example, is indebted to Othello, with Leonardo, cast in the role of Iago, provoking Eustathius to a rage of jealousy in which he kills his wife, who is called Emilia like Iago's wife in Shakespeare's play. The names of Lycander and Polonius are borrowed respectively from A Midsummer Night's Dream and Hamlet. ‘On Winter’ echoes the closing lines of Love's Labour's Lost. The library at Weston Hall contains a full set of Pope's edition of Shakespeare.

Leapor certainly read Paradise Lost. In The Unhappy Father, Leonardo speaks the following lines:

So the grand Foe of human Kind, like me,
Arriv' d within fair Eden's blissful Bounds;
There felt, like me, the keen alternate Pangs
Of Admiration, Hatred, and Despair.
Alike our Aim; both Mischief, his and mine.
No Matter; I have lost the Sense of Joy,
Excepting this,—To breed Dissension here.

(ML ii. 164)

This is an unmistakable reference to the fourth book of the epic. Since Milton's works enjoyed a huge circulation after the subscribed edition of 1688, it would be surprising if Leapor had not read them. The copy of Paradise Lost at Weston Hall is the first edition, second issue; it seems that the literary tastes of the Blencowe and Jennens families were something more than middle-brow. Outside her plays Leapor uses blank verse only in ‘The Fields of Melancholy and Chearfulness’ (ML i. 145-53); her preference for rhyme, especially the heroic couplet, indicates that influence from Paradise Lost in terms of technique was limited. Interestingly, almost two-thirds of ‘The Fields of Melancholy and Chearfulness’ is a meditation on death:

Complaining Sounds were heard on ev'ry Side,
And each bewail'd the loss of something dear:
Some mourn'd a Child that in its Bloom expir'd,
And some a Brother's or a Parent's Fate:
Lost Wealth and Honours many Tongues deplor'd,
And some were wretched, tho' they knew not why.

(ML i. 146-7)

The use of blank verse as well as the basic gloominess of the poem points not so much to Milton as to a reading of Edward Young or Robert Blair.

Among the volumes which Leapor herself owned was a copy of Dryden's Fables. It is perhaps superfluous to observe that a number of her poems are also fables, and in large measure indebted to Dryden and Gay. Her probable debt to Dryden's translations has already been observed. Among the volumes of plays in her possession, it is likely that some were by Dryden, though there is no indication of which ones. At Weston Hall there is a six-volume set of Dryden's Miscellany Poems, another six-volume set of his Dramatic Works, and a copy of his Fables.

Congreve would have been an obvious choice of reading for an aspiring playwright, and it could be argued that the closing scene of The Unhappy Father is based on The Mourning Bride, in which Almerja attempts to poison herself, having heard that her suitor, Alphonso, has been killed. In Leapor's play Terentia likewise considers drinking a cup of poison after hearing that Polonius has been devoured by a shark. In both plays the heroines are prevented from killing themselves at the last moment by the return of the man supposedly dead. While cups of poison are not uncommon in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century drama, the parallels between the two plays are sufficient to suggest that Leapor had read Congreve. It should also be noted that Leapor gave one of her poems the title ‘The Way of the World’. There is a copy of The Works of Congreve (1719) at Weston Hall. Leapor's plays show similarities also to the works of Nicholas Rowe. Betty Rizzo notes the resemblances between her treatment of women and this playwright's domestic tragedies.⁹⁶ Apart from a passage from ‘The Fair Penitent’ which seems to be echoed in Emilia's speech on the lot of women, Leapor writes an entire poem, ‘The Temple of Love’, about a dream which follows a reading of ‘Jane Shore’. Although it is possible that she knew the story in chapbook form, the phrase ‘I read the Scenes of Shore's deluded Wife’ (ML i. 162), indicates that she was reading the play. There is an edition of Rowe's Dramatick Works (1720) at Weston Hall. The plot of The Unhappy Father owes something also to Otway's ‘The Orphan’, in which a young woman, Monimia, lives in a country house under the care of an ageing guardian whose two sons compete for her love. Although Leapor does not follow Otway in allowing the young woman to be tricked into a loss of virginity, Terentia's circumstances at the beginning of the play are very likely modelled on those of Monimia. There is a set of The Works of Mr. Otway (1722) at Weston.

Finally, Leapor's unfinished play about the Saxon king Edwy may be partly modelled on Thomson's and Mallet's Alfred or Thomson's Edward and Eleonora. Leapor's play, however, does not share the topicality of these works. It also contains references to Addison's Cato. At one point Elgiva cries, ‘O! for the Constancy of Cato's Daughter!’ (ML ii. 238) When the soldier Dusterandus speaks of ravishing Emmel, he echoes Sempronius, who has designs upon Marcia, Cato's daughter:

How will my Bosom swell with anxious Joy,
When I behold her strugling in my Arms,
With glowing Beauty, and disorder'd Charms,
While Fear and Anger, with alternate Grace,
Pant in her Breast, and vary in her Face!(97)

If there is any truth in the claim of Corydon in ‘Mira's Picture’ that Mira ‘sits whole Ev'nings, reading wicked Plays’ (ML ii. 297), Leapor must have read a great number. Those that can be identified by allusions, echoes, or parallels, may be the ones she most admired and strove to imitate. Since she wrote only tragedies, her reading of comedies is difficult to pursue, yet comedies are surely the more ‘wicked’ form, and may, if Corydon is believed, have constituted a large part of her reading.

Leapor refers to a number of minor poets from the Restoration and the early part of her own century. She writes in ‘An Epistle to Artemisia. On Fame’ of one of her visitors:

Comes Codrus next, with Talents to offend;
A simple Tutor, and a saucy Friend,
Who pour'd thick Sonnets like a troubled Spring,
And such as Butler's wide-mouth'd Mortals sing:
In shocking Rhimes a Nymph's Perfections tells,
Like the harsh Ting-Tong of some Village-Bells.

(ML ii. 51)

This is an allusion to Whachum, who serves as versifier to the cunning man Sidrophel in Hudibras:

                                                            He serv' d his Master,
In quality of Poetaster:
And Rimes appropriate could make,
To ev'ry month in th' Almanack,
When Termes begin, and end, could tell,
With their Returns, in Doggerel.
.....His Sonnets charm'd th'attentive Crowd,
By wide-mouth'd Mortal trol'd aloud,
That, circled with his long ear'd Guests,
Like Orpheus look'd, among the Beasts …(98)

Leapor's debt to Samuel Butler bears further attention. Her poem ‘Mopsus’ depicts a comic knight-errantry which recalls Hudibras. Leapor's poem is written in heroic couplets rather than octosyllabics, yet she draws directly from Hudibras in the figure of Sir Sidrophel, an astrologer hired by Viscount Simper:

A sage he hir'd, whose deeply-thoughtful Skull
Could teach the Vulgar when the Moon was full;
Who scatter'd Hate among the friendly Stars,
And made e'en Venus retrograde to Mars.

(ML ii. 32)

Sidrophel offers Mopsus advice supposedly garnered from the stars, on his prospects in marriage. In Butler's poem, Sidrophel offers similar counsel to the hero:

You are in Love, Sir, with a Widdow,
Quoth he, that does not greatly heed you;
And for three years has rid your Wit
And Passion without drawing Bit:
And now your bus'ness is, to know
If you shall carry her, or no.(99)

Leapor was somewhat uneasy about Hudibrastics. In a letter to Freemantle she describes ‘Mopsus’ as ‘a kind of popular Piece’ (ML ii. 316); evidently she saw this poem as something less than ‘polite’. Certainly, to mock astrologers and almanacs is to dismiss a great deal of popular literature—but even to parody astrologers and chap-book romances in the manner of Butler is, in Leapor's view, to be writing at a popular level. Still, it may be judged that Leapor understood her own role as a poet partly in terms drawn from Samuel Butler. In an octosyllabic piece, ‘The Epistle of Deborah Dough’, she compares herself to a local cunning man: ‘But there's a Man that keeps a Dairy, ❙ Will clip the Wings of Neighbour Mary …’ (ML ii. 69). This man is a writer of verses, but more like Whachum than Mira:

                                        some People would infer
That this good Man's a Conjurer.
But I believe it is a Lye;
I never thought him so; not I:
Tho' Win'fred Hobble, who, you know,
Is plagu'd with Corns on ev'ry Toe,
Sticks on his Verse with fast'ning Spittle,
And says it helps her Feet a little.
Old Frances too his Paper tears,
And tucks it close behind her Ears;
And (as she told me t'other Day)
It charm'd her Tooth-ach quite away.

(ML ii. 70-1)

Leapor, in this poem, considers the role of the poet in popular culture. If in relation to landscape improvement Leapor makes a stand within popular culture, here, despite the humour, she shows herself to be alienated from that culture. Indeed, it appears that a reading of Samuel Butler has helped her to define herself as a poet.

Leapor refers to another supposedly popular writer in ‘The Proposal’. The muse addresses Mira about the plan for her to publish in magazines, where her verses will not be appreciated by ‘drowsy Swains ❙ … Protesting with a Critick's Spite, ❙ That none since Durfey knew to write’ (ML i. 174). Thomas D'Urfey (1653-1723), author of many dramatic and poetic works, was often the butt of literary jokes, and Leapor's reference to him shows her own desire to identify with refined authors. Her knowledge of him may have come from the volume of his Tales (1704) at Weston Hall, though his works were very widely circulated and she may have known him from many sources.

Another poem suggesting the extent of Leapor's reading is ‘Proserpine's Ragout’, which, as a descent into the underworld, follows a long tradition of poems based on Lucian. One possible model is Edward Ward's ‘A Journey to Hell’, which examines dozens of social problems, many of which Leapor summarizes in the last section of her poem. That Leapor may have read Ward's poem is suggested by another possible echo; she writes in ‘The Penitent’ concerning the sale of her poems: ‘Now, could you find an honest Dealer, ❙ As an Attorney or a Taylor …’ (ML i. 120). In ‘The Inspir'd Quill’ she again refers to lawyers:

To some Attorney let me go,
For there my Talents suit (you know)
Heroicks I shall write but ill;
But I'm a Doctor at a Bill …

(ML i. 118)

There were two lawyers in Brackley, a father and son named John Welchman; their reputations were dubious, especially the father's, though they were certainly not tailors. More likely, Leapor is thinking of these lines from ‘A Journey to Hell’, describing tailors who

After long Troubles did themselves withdraw,
From making Sutes of Cloaths, to manage Suits of Law:
Well knowing it requires an equal Skill,
To make a Lawyer's or a Taylor's Bill.(100)

Though not conclusive, the similar rhymes and the association of lawyers and tailors suggest that Leapor was thinking of Ward's poem.

Another poet who used the device of a satirical descent into Hell was William King. That Leapor knew some of King's poems is probable; one of her own invitation verses is entitled ‘To Artemisia. Dr. King's Invitation to Bellvill: imitated’. Unfortunately, this poem has proved difficult to trace, as it does not appear in William King's collections, or among the works of the younger William King of Oxford, or those of Henry King. Leapor's descriptions of cooking, although drawn from her own immediate experience, probably owe something to King's ‘The Art of Cookery’. It is worth noting that Margaret Doody believes Leapor's kitchen imagery derives from Swift.¹⁰¹ That does not exclude a reading of King. Indeed, ‘Proserpine's Ragout’, which is both a descent into the underworld and a cooking poem, at least suggests a reading of this poet.

An author Leapor obviously admires is mentioned along with Pope in ‘The Muses Embassy’:

The Muses, as some Authors say,
Who found their Empire much Decay,
Since Prior's Lute was stopp'd by Death,
And Pope resign'd his tuneful Breath …

(ML ii. 276)

In her letters Leapor refers to two contemporary authors, Colley Cibber (ML ii. 312), to whom she sent her play, and Stephen Duck, whose career she discusses in relation to her own subscription (ML ii. 314). There are two volumes of Plays Written by Mr. Cibber (1721) at Weston, but no volume of Stephen Duck. It is probable nonetheless that she had read both authors. Betty Rizzo observes the connection between Leapor's ‘Colinetta’, and the pastorals of Ambrose Philips.¹⁰² Philips's shepherd Colinet appears in his second and fourth pastorals; Leapor alters the name to Colinetta for her shepherdess, and follows Philips in the use of images from English rural life. Leapor's poem ‘On Winter’ is, of course, modelled on Philips's ‘Winter Piece’.

The folder of manuscript poems at Weston Hall contains transcripts of poems by Mary Wortley Montagu and Mary Astell on the death of Mrs Bowles. This is interesting, since it indicates that both authors were known to Susanna Jennens and probably to Mary Leapor, although there are no copies of their works in the library. Since Leapor does not name any female writers in her own works, it is valuable to know where she might have derived her views on issues of gender. That she should have developed her arguments on the rights of women, as well as a rhetoric to articulate those ideas, suggests that she read other women writers as well, though there is no easy way of proving this. One possibility is that she read the pamphlets of ‘Sophia’, but the only support for this is that the passage from Nicholas Rowe which lies behind Emilia's long speech in The Unhappy Father also appears on the title-page of Woman Not Inferior to Man (1739). Since it is almost certain that Leapor read Rowe's works for herself, the connection with ‘Sophia’ is no more than tenuous.

A poet of the mid-eighteenth century with limited access to books would be expected to read Swift before most other authors. Margaret Anne Doody has made a very reasonable case for Swift as a major influence on Leapor's work, particularly on ‘The Mistaken Lover’. A reading of Swift presumably also lies behind poems like ‘On Patience. To Stella’ and ‘On Discontent. To Stella’. Even without direct allusions, it may be taken for granted that Leapor read Gulliver's Travels, if only in chap-book form, since it was one of the most widely circulated books of the time.

Leapor makes no direct reference to John Gay. Yet her own taste for fables makes it more than probable that she read his fables as well as those of Dryden. None of her own fables is closely based on Gay's. That she read some part of his works, however, is beyond question. The following passage from ‘The Mistaken Lover’ has a strong resemblance to a passage in ‘The Fan’. Leapor describes the behaviour of an amorous beau:

He purchas'd all the Songs of Note,
And got the Lover's Cant by rote:
He brib'd her Footmen and her Maids,
And with his nightly Serenades
Her vaulted Roofs and Gardens rung:
For her he ogled, danc'd and sung;
Was often at her Toilet seen,
With Sonnets to the Paphian Queen:
Then at her Feet dejected lying,
Praying, weeping, sighing, dying.

(ML i. 82-3)

Gay's Strephon does much the same:

Strephon had long confess'd his am'rous Pain,
Which gay Corinna rally'd with Disdain:
Sometimes in broken Words he sigh'd his Care,
Look'd pale, and trembled when he view'd the Fair;
With bolder Freedoms now the Youth advanc'd,
He dress'd, he laugh'd, he sung, he rhim'd, he danc'd;
Now call'd more pow'rful Presents to his Aid,
And to seduce the Mistress, brib'd the Maid;
Smooth Flatt'ry in her softer Hours apply'd,
The surest Charm to bind the force of Pride:
But still unmov'd remains the scornful Dame,
Insults her Captive, and derides his Flame.(103)

The lines which follow this contain a lengthy appeal to Venus. Evidently Leapor has rewritten the passage in a different metre to suit the purposes of her own poem.

As might be expected, the essays of Addison and Steele had an important influence on Leapor's writing. In fact, she based entire poems on periodical essays. In ‘An Enquiry’ she writes of worlds too minute to be seen:

          Pluck off yon Acorn from its Parent Bough,
Divide that Acorn in the midst—and now
In its firm Kernal a fair Oak is seen
With spreading Branches of a sprightly Green:
From this young Tree a Kernal might we rend,
There wou'd another its small Boughs extend.

(ML i. 199)

This is based on The Tatler, no. 119, in which Addison describes a ‘good Genius’ speaking to him about microscopes:

I have been shown a Forrest of numberless Trees, which has been picked out of an Acorn. Your Microscope can show you in it a compleat Oak in Miniature; and could you suit all your Organs as we do [in our spiritual state], you might pluck an Acorn from this little Oak, which contains another Tree; and so proceed from Tree to Tree, as long as you would think fit to continue your Disquisitions.¹⁰⁴

Another of Leapor's poems drawn from a periodical is ‘The Inspir'd Quill’. She writes:

          The sage Pythagoras, you know,
Asserted many Years ago,
That when or Man or Woman dies,
The Soul to some new Mansion flies?

(ML i. 112)

The quill describes how in previous lives it has been a usurer, a beau, a lap-dog, a lawyer, and a crow. This follows the pattern of The Spectator no. 343, in which a monkey writes a letter describing his own career of transmigration: he has been variously a brahmin, a tax-collector, a flying fish, an emmet, a miser, a bee, a rake, a bay-gelding, and a beau. It is a distinct possibility that Leapor knew Pythagoras not only from this source but from Dryden's translation of Ovid, which is discussed above, although plainly the humour of her poem is modelled on The Spectator. Leapor's reading of periodicals included The Guardian, according to one of her letters (ML ii. 311). At Weston Hall there is a collection of the writings of Addison and Steele in various editions.

The influence of Alexander Pope is evident throughout Leapor's verses, though in her plays that influence tends to be submerged. It is not certain that she read all of Pope. According to Freemantle, she owned ‘Part of Mr. Pope's Works’ (ML ii, p. xxxii). This means little, since Freemantle lent Leapor the translation of the Odyssey, and probably owned his other works. At Weston Hall, apart from his edition of Shakespeare, there is only a volume of Pope's prose. This is surprising, since there were a number of aspiring poets in the house at different times, all of whom would have wanted to read his verse. Leapor, at any rate, read most of his works. The evidence is not far to seek. Titles such as ‘An Essay on Woman’ or ‘An Epistle to a Lady’ are borrowed directly from Pope. ‘The Proclamation of Apollo’, according to one of the letters, springs from a reading of the Dunciad:

The Occasion of this Whim was the reading of that list prefixed to Mr. Pope's Dunciad, which tells us the Number of his Enemies.—After having fretted at their Impudence, who durst scribble against my favourite Author, I began to reflect on the Stupidity of Goose-quill Wars, and these Knight-Errants of Apollo.

(ML ii. 309)

Another poem is entitled ‘On Mr. Pope's Universal Prayer’, and, like its original, asserts the need for religious tolerance. In other places she quotes Pope directly, as in ‘Dorinda at her Glass’: ‘Thus Pope has sung, thus let Dorinda sing; ❙ “Virtue, brave Boys,—'tis Virtue makes a King:”’ (ML i. 7), lines taken from ‘The First Epistle of the First Book of Horace Imitated’ (Pope, iv. 285, l. 92). In one of her letters she quotes from memory Pope's desire to ‘Maintain a Poet's Dignity and Ease, ❙ And see what Friends, and read what Books I please’. Here she is drawing from the ‘Epistle to Dr Arbuthnot’ (Pope, iv. 114, ll. 263-4). This poem is likely also to be the model for her ‘Epistle to Artemisia. On Fame’ (see ECWP, 526 n). Although she makes no direct reference to it, there is no doubt that Leapor read ‘The Rape of the Lock’. ‘Dorinda at her Glass’ is about a woman at her toilet; Leapor is not, however, simply re-creating Belinda's youthful folly, since Dorinda is an older woman attempting to deny the imminence of death. Still, the poem is a response to Pope's work. ‘Crumble Hall’, similarly, is partly a response to the ‘Epistle to Burlington’.

In some areas of her work, it must be observed, Leapor moves away from Pope—her pastorals, for example, use images from actual rural life. As a reader of the Guardian, she must have known about the controversy on this point, and chosen to follow Philips rather than Pope. … Leapor questions Pope's views of women, and … [she presents] a far less enthusiastic view of landscape improvement than that in the ‘Epistle to Burlington’. Leapor's regard for Pope, however, surpassed by a very long way her feelings for any other writer. ‘Celadon to Mira’, a poem in which the shade of Pope appears to Mira, ends with this remarkable couplet: ‘Still look to Heav'n and its Laws attend, ❙ And next the Lines of thy aerial Friend’ (ML i. 142). Pope's verse has for Leapor a significance second only to scripture. Of course, Leapor's enthusiasm for Pope was shared by many poets of the time. The impression that Leapor read Pope and little else is understandable though false. Leapor's identification with Pope can be seen in the grief of her poem ‘On the Death of a justly admir'd Author’, and in the anger against his critics expressed here in ‘The Libyan Hunter’:

          Old Story tells us, on an earthly Plain
Once Jove descended wrap'd in golden Rain:
Now Fate permits no such familiar Powers,
But Shoals of Criticks fall in leaden Showers:
These gaze at Wit, as Owls behold the Sun,
And curse the Lustre which they fain wou'd shun;
These Beasts of Prey no living worth endure,
Nor are the Regions of the Dead secure …

(ML i. 153)

Repeatedly through her work Leapor asserts her allegiance to Pope; she sees in him a genius thoroughly misunderstood. Doubtless, she projects on to him her own resentment against those who belittle her writing. Pope, for Leapor as for many others in her time, is the apogee of literary achievement, the ultimate model of good writing. Leapor may rightly be described as an imitator of Pope, yet her willingness to depart from his procedures or argue against some of his ideas shows that there is nothing slavish in her imitation. Indeed, Leapor's attitude towards Pope very much reflects her tendency to respect the intellectual, social, and religious traditions of her society while arguing bravely against specific ideas or practices which she believes are oppressive. Leapor's passionate admiration of Pope's work is matched by a robust independence of mind.

There is no simple equation between authors named, quoted, or echoed by Leapor and the full extent of her reading. In some cases she may simply be dropping names of authors she has not read, yet it is most likely that she read more authors than can be identified simply from her poetry. Her references to other writers indicate a substantial amount of reading, yet she makes no discernible reference to Thomson's poetry, or to the novels of Defoe, Richardson, and Fielding. Since these authors had a huge circulation, it is hard to imagine that she did not read some of their works.

Leapor's reading included some learned works which are not in the narrow sense literary. … The library at Weston Hall contains a number of [theological and spiritual works]. ‘To Lucinda’ records her feeling that theology was the most important gap in her reading, though at the end of her life she was reading philosophy or theology, as she indicates in ‘An Epistle to a Lady’:

But tho' these Eyes the learned Page explore,
And turn the pond'rous Volumes o'er and o'er,
I find no Comfort from their Systems flow,
But am dejected more as more I know.

(ML i. 38-9)

These volumes were doubtless borrowed from Freemantle, but it is difficult to know what they were. …, Leapor at some point became acquainted with at least part of John Locke's writings. The expression ‘pond'rous Volumes’ suggests that she was reading substantial works by a number of authors.

In several poems Leapor displays a knowledge of the law. Apart from her comments on lawyers' bills, there is evidence of a knowledge of documents. One of her best poems, ‘Mira's Will’, opens with the word ‘Imprimis’, and closes with the direction:

All this let my Executors fulfil,
And rest assur'd that this is Mira's Will,
Who was, when she these Legacies design'd,
In Body healthy, and compos'd in Mind.

(ML i. 10)

The schoolteacher in Brackley, Richard Cooper, was both a book-binder and a scrivener of sorts. In the smallpox epidemic of 1742 he took down a will for Henry Purefoy which was executed by John Welchman, senior. It is very probable that Leapor's comments on attorneys would have originated through her contact with Cooper, who in turn would have witnessed any sharp dealing by Welchman (see Clarke, 105-9). Her knowledge of the law suggests an association with Cooper that went beyond the ordinary curriculum; he may have put her to some use in relation to his legal work or his book business. Her grasp of legal nomenclature is evident in ‘The Inspir'd Quill’:

          Once more to gain a human Face,
I step'd into a Lawyer's Case:
This Station pleas'd me wond'rous well,
And in a trice I learn'd to spell,
Cou'd read old Coke with prying Eyes,
Explain, distinguish, and advise,
Talk Latin to a good degree;
As Admittendo Custode,
Eject, Extendi: and my Fee:
'Tis true I scorn'd to rob or kill,
But not to cheat or forge a Will:
In Jointures I cou'd split a Hair,
And make it turn against the Heir:
I spar'd no Widow for her Tears,
No Orphan for his tender Years:
My Maxim was get Money, Man,
Get Money, where and how you can …

(ML i. 115)

Leapor uses a few Latinisms, indicating at least an acquaintance with the language, that is, enough to recognize pretence in a lawyer. Sir Edward Coke was a byword for legal knowledge in her time, and the reference does not imply that she had read his works. Leapor does have a grasp of legal jargon, none the less, and that suggests some knowledge of law books.

It can be established that Leapor had read at least a fair selection of literary works, and a more modest number of works in other areas. Although Leapor's reading constituted something less than a full education, she cannot be considered a primitive. Indeed, there is a great difference between a person who educated herself and a primitive as conceived by eighteenth-century theorists. Leapor worked hard to repair the gaps in her learning, and would have continued to do so. It is interesting that in ‘An Epistle to a Lady’ she actually calls herself learned (see ML i. 39). While ‘To Lucinda’ does portray Mira as a primitive, it is likely that ‘An Epistle to a Lady’ represents Leapor's true judgement of the depth of her own education. Donna Landry accurately describes her as the ‘most writerly’ of women poets of the labouring class (Landry, 119). Leapor had some grasp of literary tradition and a reasonable knowledge of contemporary authors; therefore, she was to some extent also a ‘readerly’ poet.

Notes

1. James Sutherland, A Preface to Eighteenth-Century Poetry (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1948), 105.

2. Anne Finch, The Poems of Anne Countess of Winchilsea, ed. Myra Reynolds (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1903), 5.

3. Germaine Greer et al., ed., Introduction, in Kissing the Rod: An Anthology of Seventeenth-Century Women's Verse (London: Virago, 1988), 1.

4. Ann Messenger, ‘Introduction: Restoring the Picture’, in His and Hers: Essays in Restoration and Eighteenth-Century Literature (Lexington: The University of Kentucky Press, 1986), 9.

5. Beth Kowaleski-Wallace, ‘Milton's Daughters: The Education of Eighteenth-Century Women Writers’, Feminist Studies, 12 (1986), 275-93.

6. Jessica Munns, review of The Prostituted Muse: Images of Women and Women Dramatists 1642-1737, by Jacqueline Pearson, Restoration and 18th Century Theatre Research, ser. 2/4 (1989), 64.

7. See Northrop Frye, ‘Towards Defining an Age of Sensibility’, ELH 23 (1956), 144-52.

8. Munns, review of The Prostituted Muse, 64.

9. Lawrence Stone, The Family, Sex and Marriage in England 1500-1800 (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1977), 270-404. See also Randolph Trumbach, The Rise of the Egalitarian Family: Aristocratic Kinship and Domestic Relations in Eighteenth-Century England (New York, San Francisco, and London: Academic Press, 1978).

10. See Kathleen M. Davies, ‘The Sacred Condition of Equality: how Original were Puritan Doctrines of Marriage?’, Social History, no. 5 (May 1977), 563-80; E. P. Thompson, ‘Happy Families’, review of The Family, Sex and Marriage in England 1500-1800, by Lawrence Stone, New Society (8 Sept. 1977), 499; Keith Wrightson, English Society 1580-1680 (London: Hutchinson, 1980), 70-86; Margaret Spufford, Small Books and Pleasant Histories: Popular Fiction and its Readership in Seventeenth-Century England (London: Methuen, 1981), 157-61; J. A. Sharpe, ‘Plebeian Marriage in Stuart England: Some Evidence from Popular Literature’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, ser. 5/36 (1986), 69-90; also of interest is Miriam Slater, who puts forward an argument similar to that of Stone in ‘The Weightiest Business: Marriage in an Upper-Gentry Family in Seventeenth-Century England’, Past & Present, no. 72 (Aug. 1976), 25-54; Sara Heller Mendelson responds to Slater in ‘The Weightiest Business: Marriage in an Upper-Gentry Family in Seventeenth-Century England’, Past & Present, no. 85 (Nov. 1979), 126-35; Miriam Slater, ‘A Rejoinder’, Past & Present, no. 85 (Nov. 1979), 136-40.

11. Eva Figes, Sex and Subterfuge: Women Novelists to 1850 (London and Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1982), 5-6.

12. Katherine Lyle M. Rogers, Feminism in Eighteenth-Century England (Brighton: Harvester, 1982), 1.

13. See Judith Phillips Stanton, ‘Statistical Profile of Women Writing in English from 1660 to 1800’, in Frederick M. Keener and Susan E. Lorsch (ed.), Eighteenth-Century Women and the Arts (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1988), 247-54. Stanton argues that the publication of women authors achieved momentum by itself; the appearance of one woman in print would encourage a number of others to make the attempt. This argument implies that the growth of publishing rather than a new attitude towards marriage itself was crucial to the growth of women's writing.

14. Janelle Greenberg, ‘The Legal Status of the English Woman in Early Eighteenth-Century Common Law and Equity’, Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture, 4, Proceedings of the American Society for Eighteenth Century Studies (Madison and London: University of Wisconsin Press, 1975), 175.

15. See John R. Gillis, ‘Married but not Churched: Plebeian Sexual Relations and Marital Nonconformity in Eighteenth-Century Britain’, in Robert MacCubbin (ed.), 'Tis Nature's Fault: Unauthorized Sexuality during the Enlightenment (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 31-42.

16. Rogers, Feminism in Eighteenth-Century England, 36-8.

17. Catherine Jemmat, ‘Essay in Vindication of the Female Sex’, in Miscellanies, in Prose and Verse (London, 1766), 103-4.

18. Olwen Hufton, ‘Women without Men: Widows and Spinsters in Britain and France in the Eighteenth Century’, Journal of Family History, 9 (1984), 357-8.

19. Ibid. 355-66.

20. Daniel Defoe, Roxana, ed. Jane Jack (London, New York, and Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1964; paperback edn., 1981), 144.

21. See Bridget Hill, ‘A Refuge from Men: The Idea of a Protestant Nunnery’, Past & Present, no. 117 (Nov. 1987), 107-30.

22. Janet Todd, ed., A Dictionary of British and American Women Writers 1660-1800 (London: Methuen, 1984), Introduction, 3-4.

23. Charlotte Lennox, The Female Quixote, ed. Margaret Dalziel (London, New York, and Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1970), 367.

24. Pat Rogers, ‘Puellilia’, review of Mothers of the Novel: One Hundred Good Women Writers Before Jane Austen, by Dale Spender, London Review of Books (7 Aug. 1986), 11.

25. Jocelyn Harris, ‘Sappho, Souls, and the Salic Law of Wit’, in Alan C. Kors and Paul J. Korshin (ed.), Anticipations of the Enlightenment in England, France, and Germany (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1987), 232-58.

26. Margaret Anne Doody, ‘Swift among the Women’, Yearbook of English Studies, 18 (1988), 68-92. For two less interesting treatments of women poets in the period see Anke Janssen, ‘Frühe Lyrikerinnen des 18. Jahrhunderts in ihrem Verhältnis zur Poetik und zur Poetic Diction’, Anglia, 99 (1981), 111-33; and Karl Heinz Göller, ‘The Emancipation of Women in Eighteenth-Century English Literature’, Anglia, 101 (1983), 78-98.

27. Claire Tomalin, ‘A Buried Treasury of Wicked Wits’, review of ECWP, The Independent (7 Oct. 1989), 34.

28. Jocelyn Harris, Samuel Richardson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 18.

29. John Locke, ‘The First Treatise’, in Two Treatises of Government, ed. Peter Laslett (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1960; 2nd edn., 1967), 192.

30. See Rogers, Feminism in Eighteenth-Century England, 53-84; Alice Browne, The Eighteenth Century Feminist Mind (Brighton: Harvester, 1987), pp. 20-1.

31. Mary Astell, Some Reflections Upon Marriage (London, 1700; 2nd edn., 1703), 29.

32. ‘Sophia’, Woman Not Inferior to Man (London, 1739), 15.

33. Mary Jones, ‘To Hon. Miss Lovelace’, in Miscellanies in Prose and Verse (Oxford, 1750), 321.

34. See Mary Wortley Montagu, ‘The Reasons that Induced Dr. S[wift] to write a Poem call'd the Lady's Dressing room’, in Essays and Poems and Simplicity, A Comedy, ed. Robert Halsband and Isobel Grundy (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977), 273-6; Miss W———, ‘The Gentleman's Study, In Answer to [Swift's] The Lady's Dressing Room’, ECWP 130-4.

35. Doody, ‘Swift among the Women’, 79-80.

36. Ibid., 79.

37. See John Clare, ‘The Autobiography 1793-1824’, in The Prose of John Clare, ed. J. W. Tibble and Anne Tibble (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1951), 19. It should be noted that stories told (or read) at harvest time may also have been conventional in some kinds of poetry: see Christopher Smart, ‘A Noon-Piece’, in The Poetical Works of Christopher Smart, ed. Karina Williamson and Marcus Walsh, 5 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980-), vol. iv: Miscellaneous Poems English and Latin, ed. Karina Williamson (1987), 143.

38. Hufton, ‘Women without Men’, 356.

39. Lady Dorothea Dubois, ‘A True Tale’, in Poems on Several Occasions (Dublin, 1764), 13-14.

40. Betty Rizzo, ‘Leapor, Mary’, in Todd (ed.), A Dictionary of British and American Women Writers 1660-1800, 192-3.

41. Nicholas Rowe, ‘The Fair Penitent’, in The Dramatick Works of Nicholas Rowe, Esq., 2 vols. (London, 1720), i. 30.

42. See Carolyn Williams, ‘The Changing Face of Change: Fe/male In/constancy’, British Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies, 12 (1989), 13-28.

43. Sarah Dixon, ‘On the Loss of Stella's Friendship’, in Poems on Several Occasions (Canterbury, 1740), 54.

44. Mary Whateley, ‘The Vanity of external Accomplishments’, in Original Poems on Several Occasions (London, 1764), 104.

45. For discussions of the idea of an implied reader, see Wolfgang Iser, The Implied Reader: Patterns of Communication in Prose Fiction from Bunyan to Beckett (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974); Walter J. Ong, ‘The Writer's Audience is Always a Fiction’, in Interfaces of the Word: Studies in the Evolution of Consciousness and Culture (Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell University Press, 1977), 53-81.

46. Patricia Meyer Spacks, Gossip (New York: Alfred P. Knopf, 1985), 22.

47. John Sitter, Literary Loneliness in Mid-Eighteenth Century England (Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell University Press, 1982), 85-6. I am indebted to Dr Roger Lonsdale for his comments on Sitter's argument in relation to problems of the poetic canon.

48. Lillian Faderman, Surpassing the Love of Men: Romantic Friendship and Love Between Women from the Renaissance to the Present (New York: William Morrow and Company, 1981), 19.

49. Ruth Perry, The Celebrated Mary Astell: An Early English Feminist (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 140.

50. Janet Todd, Women's Friendship in Literature (New York: Columbia University Press, 1980), 359-60.

51. Nina Auerbach, Communities cf Women: An Idea in Fiction (Cambridge, Mass. and London: Harvard University Press, 1978), 7.

52. Reynolds, The Learned Lady in England 1650-1760, 247.

53. Harris, ‘Sappho, Souls, and the Salic Law of Wit’, 242.

54. Anne Finch, ‘An Epilogue to the Tragedy of Jane Shore’, in Poems, 101.

55. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, ‘To Lady Bute’, in The Complete Letters of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, ed. Robert Halsband, 3 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1965-7), iii (1967), 135.

56. Elizabeth Teft, ‘On Viewing Herself in a Glass’, in Orinthia's Miscellanies (London, 1747), 54.

57. Castle, ‘Unruly and Unresigned’, review of ECWP, p. 1228.

58. Roy Porter, ‘Making Faces: Physiognomy and Fashion in Eighteenth-Century England’, Études Anglaises: Grande Bretagne, États-Unis, 38 (1985), 387.

59. Ibid. 389.

60. Ibid.

61. Keith Thomas, ‘The Place of Laughter in Tudor and Stuart England’, TLS (21 Jan. 1977), 80.

62. Browne, The Eighteenth Century Feminist Mind, 32-3; see also Fenela Ann Childs, ‘Prescriptions for Manners in English Courtesy Literature, 1690-1760, and their Social Implications’ (D.Phil. thesis, Oxford University, 1984), esp. 246-7.

63. See Marion K. Bragg, The Formal Eclogue in Eighteenth-Century England, University of Maine Studies, ser. 26 (Orono, Me.: The University Press, 1926), 88.

64. James Boswell, Boswell's Life of Johnson, ed. G. B. Hill, rev. L. F. Powell, 6 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press 1934-50), i (1934), 397.

65. The Young Gentleman and Lady Instructed, 2 vols. (London, 1747), ii. 162; cited by Childs, ‘Prescriptions for Manners’, 252.

66. John Breval, The Art of Dress (London, 1717), 19-20; for a discussion of Breval and the problems of tooth-brushing in the early eighteenth century see Childs, ‘Prescriptions for Manners’, 252.

67. Porter, ‘Making Faces’, 391.

68. Doody, ‘Swift among the Women’, 79.

69. See Maximilian Novak, ed., English Literature in the Age of Disguise (Berkeley and London: University of California Press, 1977); Terry Castle, Masquerade and Civilization: The Carnivalesque in Eighteenth-Century English Culture and Fiction (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1986).

70. Doody, ‘Tit for Tat’, review of ECWP, p. 3.

71. Ibid., 4.

72. Esther Lewis, ‘A Letter to a Lady in London’, in Poems Moral and Entertaining (Bath, 1789), 300.

73. See Chauncey Brewster Tinker, Nature's Simple Plan: A Phase of Radical Thought in the Mid-Eighteenth Century (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1922; London: Humphrey Milford, Oxford University Press, 1922), 6-7. For standard works on primitivism, see A. O. Lovejoy, ‘Monboddo and Rousseau’, in Essays in the History of Ideas (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Press, 1948), 38-61; René Wellek, A History of Modern Criticism 1750-1950, 6 vols. (London: Jonathan Cape, 1955-86), vol. i: The Later Eighteenth Century (1955), esp. 105-32; M. H. Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1953), esp. 78-84; James M. Osborn, ‘Spence, Natural Genius and Pope’, Philological Quarterly, 45 (1966), 123-44; Walter Jackson Bate, The Burden of the Past and the English Poet (London: Chatto & Windus, 1971), esp. 47-54. See also Lois Whitney, Primitivism and the Idea of Progress in English Popular Literature of the Eighteenth Century (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Press, 1934); A. O. Lovejoy, Gilbert Chinard, George Boas, and Ronald S. Crane, gen. eds., A Documentary History of Primitivism and Related Ideas, 1 vol. only: A. O. Lovejoy and George Boas, Primitivism and Related Ideas in Antiquity (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Press, 1935); Samuel H. Monk, The Sublime: A Study of Critical Theories in XVIII-Century England (New York: Modern Language Association of America, 1935); Basil Willey, The Eighteenth Century Background: Studies on the Idea of Nature in the Thought of the Period (London: Chatto & Windus, 1940); Ernest Lee Tuveson, The Imagination as a Means of Grace: Locke and the Aesthetics of Romanticism (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1960); Patricia Phillips, The Adventurous Muse: Theories of Originality in English Poetics 1650-1760, Studia Anglistica Upsaliensia, 53 (Uppsala: Uppsala University, 1984), esp. 66-106.

74. Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp, 83.

75. William Duff, An Essay on Original Genius (London, 1767), 281-2.

76. Thomas Blackwell, An Enquiry into the Life and Writings of Homer (London, 1735), 26-7.

77. Wellek, History of Modern Criticism, 127-32; also useful is the discussion of Wellek's argument in Rizzo, 329-31.

78. Richard Farmer, An Essay on the Learning of Shakespeare (Cambridge, 1767), 49.

79. Elizabeth Montagu, An Essay on the Writings and Genius of Shakespeare (London, 1769), 7-8.

80. Mark Akenside, The Pleasures of the Imagination (London, 1744), 119-20.

81. Ann Yearsley, ‘To Mr. ****, an Unlettered Poet, on Genius Unimproved’, in Poems, on Various Subjects, (London, 1787), 77-8.

82. Woodhouse, ‘The Life and Lucubrations of Crispinus Scriblerus’, in Life and Poetical Works, i. 71-2.

83. Henry Home, Lord Kames, Elements of Criticism, 2 vols. (9th edn., Edinburgh, 1817), ii. 446; cited by Wellek, History of Modern Criticism, 109.

84. Proposals For Printing by Subscription The Poetical Works, Serious and Humorous, Of Mrs. Leapor, lately Deceased.

85. Duncombe, The Feminiad, 20-1.

86. Todd, Preface and Acknowledgements, in A Dictionary of British and American Women Writers 1660-1800, p. xx.

87. Mary Masters, ‘To the Gentleman who questioned my being the Author of the foregoing Verses’, in Poems on Several Occasions (London, 1733), 45.

88. Victor E. Neuburg, Popular Literature: A History and Guide from the Beginning of Printing to the Year 1897 (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977), 106; see also Neuburg's Popular Education in Eighteenth Century England (London: Woburn Press, 1971).

89. M. G. Jones, The Charity School Movement: A Study of Eighteenth Century Puritanism in Action (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1938), 80.

90. Keith Thomas, ‘The Meaning of Literacy in Early Modern England’, in Gerd Baumann (ed.), The Written Word: Literacy in Transition, The Wolfson College Lectures, 1985 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986), 99-102.

91. Thomas Bowles, Preface, Aristarchus: Or, A Compendious and Rational Institution of the Latin Tongue (Oxford, 1740; rev. edn., 1748), p. iv. The earlier edition did not include the preface from which the quotation is taken.

92. Philip Dormer Stanhope, The Letters of the Earl of Chesterfield to his Son, ed. Charles Strachey, 2 vols. (London, 1901), i. 230; cited by Thomas, ‘The Meaning of Literacy’, 101.

93. Bowles, A Compendious and Rational Institution of the Latin Tongue, 105.

94. Blunden, ‘A Northamptonshire Poetess’, 65; see also Thomas Creech, The Idylliums of Theocritus (Oxford, 1684).

95. Martin Bladen, trans., Julius Caesar's Commentaries (London, 1705).

96. Rizzo, ‘Leapor, Mary’, in Todd. (ed.), A Dictionary of British and American Women Writers 1660-1800, 192.

97. Joseph Addison, Cato: A Tragedy (London, 1713), 43-4.

98. Samuel Butler, ‘The Second Part: Canto III’, in Hudibras, ed. John Wilders (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967), 162-3.

99. Ibid. 168.

100. Ward, ‘A Journey to H——: Or, A Visit Paid to the D——’, in Works, iii. 25.

101. Doody, ‘Swift among the Women’, 82.

102. Rizzo, ‘Christopher Smart, The “C.S.” Poems, and Molly Leapor's Epitaph’, 26.

103. Gay, ‘The Fan’, in Poetry and Prose, i. 59-60.

104. Donald F. Bond, ed., The Tatler, 3 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987), ii. 208.