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Author Biography

Jo Yates is currently engaged in an NWCDTP AHRC-funded PhD entitled Inheriting Erasmus Darwin’s ‘The Temple of Nature’: Family History, Evolutionary Thought, and Public Debate. This project is in collaboration with Keele University, Erasmus Darwin House and the Johnson Birthplace Museum in Lichfield, UK. She holds an MA in English Literature from Keele (2021) and a BA in English Literature from the University of British Columbia, Canada (1989). Her research interests lie in the long eighteenth century generally, but specifically with the women poets of that period.

Abstract

Mary Leapor (1722-46) is one of the many under-studied women poets of the eighteenth-century. She is often described as a laboring-class poet which, while historically accurate, implies her immediate marginalization as an writer by her class and gender. Her focus of enquiry explores a new female authorial interiority, embracing her own volition, personality, and aesthetic sensibility through the act of writing itself. This nascent individualism, arising from the examination of feeling, lies at the heart of her work and heralds the social protest that will erupt later in the century. This paper hopes to offer a broader perspective on Leapor’s work through close readings of a selection of her poems and analysis of the ideas this precocious, self-educated woman was exploring in her work.

Keywords

Mary Leapor, eighteenth century, poetry, feminism, interiority, social protest

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