CRITICISM

Doody, Margaret Anne. “Sensuousness in the Poetry of Eighteenth-Century Women Poets.” In Women's Poetry in the Enlightenment: The Making of a Canon, 1730-1820, edited by Isobel Armstrong and Virginia Blain, pp. 3-32. New York: Macmillan/St. Martin's Press, 1999.

Uses the poetry of Leapor and her contemporaries Mary Yearsley, Mary Robinson, Anna Seward, and Anna Laetitia Barbauld to illustrate that female poets in the eighteenth century expressed an empathy with animals.

Greene, Richard. Mary Leapor: A Study in Eighteenth-Century Women's Poetry. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993, 243 p.

Comprehensive biographical and critical study.

Harris, Jocelyn. “Sappho, Souls, and the Salic Law of Wit.” In Anticipations of the Enlightenment in England, France, and Germany, edited by Alan C. Kors and Paul J. Korshin, pp. 232-58. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1987.

Shows how the writers featured in John Dunscombe's 1751 Female Genius, which included a consideration of Leapor's poetry, were forced to defend the possession and use of their literary gifts.

Lilley, Kate. “Homosocial Women: Martha Samson, Constantia Grierson, Mary Leapor and Georgic Verse Epistle.” In Women's Poetry in the Enlightenment: The Making of a Canon, 1730-1820, edited by Isobel Armstrong and Virginia Blain, pp. 167-83. New York: Macmillan/St. Martin's Press, 1999.

Discusses personal relationships among female poets and literary connections among their works.

Rizzo, Betty. “Christopher Smart, The ‘C.S.’ Poems, and Molly Leapor's Epitaph.” The Library, no. 1 (1983): 21-31.

Considers the possibility that Christopher Smart wrote the “Epitaph on Molly Leapor.”

Additional coverage of Mary Leapor's life and career is contained in the following sources published by the Gale Group: Dictionary of Literary Biography, Vol. 109; and Literature Resource Center.