Poetic Sisters

Deborah Kennedy is professor of English at Saint Mary’s University, in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada, where she specializes in British literature of the eighteenth century and the romantic period. She is the author of Helen Maria Williams and the Age of Revolution (Bucknell University Press) andshe has published on a variety of subjects,including women’s literary history, womenand popular music, eighteenth-century arthistory, and the British poetic tradition.

This articulate, accessible book focuses on the lives, careers, legacies, and most importantly the verses of five women poets of the early 18th century: Anne Finch, Elizabeth Rowe, the Countess of Hertford, Sarah Dixon, and Mary Jones. Kennedy (Saint Mary's Univ., Halifax, Nova Scotia) builds on the work of critics and scholars such as Roger Lonsdale, Paula Backscheider, Janet Todd, William McCarthy, Isobel Grundy, Margaret Doody, and others who, over the past 25 years, have established the importance of women writers of this period and explored their poetic achievement. The recovery and recuperation of 18th-century women poets is itself an achievement that merits consideration both on its own terms and for literary history's sake. Kennedy's study is significant in its depth of treatment of these five poets, presenting each in view of her distinctive poetic voice and resonances with other poets of the time, including one another. Engagingly written, beautifully illustrated (visually and poetically), this study should attract a new generation of critics and scholars who will find the author's contextualization of the material and interpretations of individual poems fresh, provocative, and nuanced. Summing Up: Highly recommended. Lower-division undergraduates through faculty and general readers.

• Contents List of Illustrations Acknowledgments Chapter One: Introducing the Poetic Sisters Chapter Two: “She Triumphs with a Song”: The Poetry of Anne Finch, Countess of WinchilseaChapter Three: Singing Her Heart Out: Elizabeth Rowe Chapter Four: The Countess of Hertford and the Poetry of the English Landscape Chapter Five: Sarah Dixon, the Kentish Poetess Chapter Six: Mary Jones, the Oxford Poet Chapter Seven: Sisterly Muses Bibliography