Eighteenth-Century Women Poets

Shows how eighteenth-century women's literature redefined nation and culture in class and gendered terms.This book examines the poems of three Englishwomen-washerwoman Mary Collier, middle-class feminist polemicist Mary Scott, Bristol milkwoman Ann Yearsley, and Scottish dairywoman from Ayrshire, Janet Little. It questions how national identity might have influenced gender and class affiliations, and, reciprocally, how gender might have determined a nationalist impulse, particularly as it played out during the revolutionary period (1770-1800) in which most of the texts were written.