It is amazing that these writers were self-educated and managed to write poetry while having jobs as washer-woman and milkmaid to earn a living. While sometimes writing out of their daily life’s experience, they are at other times concerned with the same issues as better educated and more wealthy writers, such as the role of women, or establish a discourse of their own by answering to another poet’s writing.
Stephen Duck wrote about his daily toil in the field, accusing women of not working as hard as men. He was lucky to gain the attention of Queen Caroline, who gave him a salary, so he did not have to work as a laborer anymore, and made him the keeper of her library.
Mary Collier, a washer-woman her whole life, answered his poem The Thresher’s Labour with an epistle, defending women. Not only does she claim women to work as hard as men, but indeed even harder, because in addition to their work in the field they have to attend to a husband and raise the children.
Mary Leapor no doubt puts herself in the role of the country maid in The Month of August, rejecting her courtier who tries to tempt her with riches. The country maid claims to be quite happy with what she owns and her life, advising him to look for a woman of his rank. Leapor also refers to herself in her poetry by the name of Mira, as in An Epistle to a Lady and Mira’s Will. An Essay on Woman deals with the familiar theme of women’s fate.
Anne Yearsley in On Mrs. Montagu both praises women as equally capable as men, and also thanks her patron Elizabeth Montagu. To Indifference shows her on the brink of Romanticism, rejecting sensibility. To those who accuse the Author of Ingratitude is directed at her other patron, Hannah More, with whom she broke.
November 7, 2008 at 8:47 pm
So were these writers successful in their attempts to write about “the same issues as better educated and more wealthy writers, such as the role of women, or establish a discourse of their own by answering to another poet’s writing”? Or were they under any constraints?