The Poetry of Mary Leapor

After nearly two-and-a-half centuries of relative neglect, in the past three decades Mary Leapor's reputation has soared to heights unseen even in the aftermath of publication of her two posthumous collections of poetry in 1748 and 1751. Today she is widely regarded as having possessed the most memorable poetic voice of any woman poet of the mid-eighteenth century.'

'Considering in close detail a range of both her most widely-discussed poems alongside lesser-known works, this study assesses the reasons for her dramatic resurgence in popularity.'

'Arguing that critics have too often seen Leapor's work as the production of polarised tendencies towards either angry, rebellious resistance, or to fatalistic, resignatory melancholy, Leapor is rehabilitated as a poet of contradictions, ambivalences and multiplicities, a poet, in her own words, who is "aukward still" - for twenty-first-century readers as much as for our eighteenth-century forebears.

About the author:

Stephen Van-Hagen is the editor of The Life and Lucubrations of Crispinus Scriblerus: A Selection by James Woodhouse (Gloucester: The Cyder Press, 2005) and has published articles on Woodhouse, Stephen Duck and washing-day poems of the eighteenth century.'

'He is the author of The Poetry of Jonathan Swift in the Greenwich Exchange Focus On series, and his poetry has appeared in Anon, Great Works, Nth Position and Erbacce. He is programme Leader for English Literature at Edge Hill University, Lancashire, UK, where he is a member of the University's Poetry and Poetics Research Group.

64  pages

ISBN: 978-1-906075-35-4