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This chapter presents “The Spleen” by English poet Anne Finch. Finch, the daughter of a baronet, lived between 1661 and 1720. As maid of honor to the duchess of York and at the center of fashion around the court of James II, she met Heneage Finch. In 1685 she married Finch, who later became the fourth earl of Winchilsea. “Ardelia” was Anne Finch's pen name. “The Spleen,” is the best known of her works — a Pindaric ode that appeared in Charles Gildon's miscellany in 1701. The poem is thought to be based on Finch's personal experience: she had constitutionally low spirits and suffered from melancholy. She believed the malady to be physical in origin and tried various nostrums, including tea, coffee, and mineral springs.

In The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination (1979), Gilbert and Gubar posit Milton and Paradise Lost as a ‘bogey’ for women writers. Wittreich’s Feminist Milton (1987) suggests an alternative reception history in which Milton’s poetry provided the basis for a more inclusive literary canon. This chapter re-examines the question of the relationship between Milton’s poetry, primarily Paradise Lost, and women’s literary history through a case study of the poetry of Anne Finch, Countess of Winchilsea (1661–1720). Though Finch acknowledges Milton’s influence explicitly in her blank-verse pastoral ‘Fanscomb Barn’, implicit debts are present throughout Finch’s 1713 Miscellany Poems and the fair-copy manuscript compilation ‘Miscellany Poems with Two Plays by Ardelia’ (1691–1701). The very different status of Milton and his verse in these two contexts illustrates the conflicted legacy of Paradise Lost for women’s literary history.

Anne Kingsmill Finch, Countess of Winchilsea, began writing poems in secret. In 1684, she and her husband Heneage Finch became political outcasts in England following the revolution of 1688 and the ouster of King James II. Anne’s poems were published for the first time in 1691, but anonymously. Her own collection Miscellany Poems on Several Occasions, which appeared in 1713, received praise from Jonathan Swift and Alexander Pope. This chapter features one of the poems in that collection, “The Unequal Fetters,” in which Finch criticizes the institution of heterosexual marriage.

Many poets first appeared in print in miscellanies published by John Dryden and Jacob Tonson that appeared in the 1690s and continued to be published through the first two decades of the eighteenth century, Others first appeared in periodicals such as the Spectator and the Guardian. Women poets including Mary Mollineux, Sarah Fyge, Elizabeth Singer Rowe, Mary Chudleigh, and Anne Finch published book-length collections. Among the most popular poetic forms were the Pindaric ode and the pastoral, some poets attempting to match classical models, others such as Gay making mocking use of the pastoral to comment on contemporary life. Isaac Watts published important and influential collections of hymns. Daniel Defoe published his longest satire, Jure Divino. Our view of many popular poets of this decade, however, including John Dennis, Thomas Tickell, Richard Blackmore, and Ambrose Philips, has been through the lens of Alexander Pope’s later satire on his contemporaries, The Dunciad.

This chapter examines how Milton, celebrated as an epic poet, became a presiding muse of lyric poetry during a period when the generic category of lyric came to be expanded in scope and elevated in literary prestige. It argues for the formal and thematic influence of Milton’s companion-poems, L’Allegro and Il Penseroso, as models for the eighteenth-century ‘great ode’. In particular, Milton’s concern with voluntary choice and eudaimonia in those poems was reborn in the eighteenth-century vogue for what might be called the poetry of health—a poetry concerned with the well-being of both body and mind, both poet and poetic tradition. The chapter traces that concern in the works of Anne Finch, John Pomfret, Thomas Parnell, Joseph Warton, William Collins, and Mark Akenside.

This chapter begins with an overview of translations of classical poetry by women translators through the ages, examining, in particular, their prefaces and author statements, including those by Lucy Hutchinson, Anne Finch, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Anna Swanwick, and H.D., through to Mary Barnard, Diane Rayor, and Sarah Ruden. It concludes with Josephine Balmer’s own personal statement, exploring the paths that led her to classical poetry translation.

The nature of the female sex and roles of women in the family were being increasing debated by both male and female writers. Satires against marriage, fashions, and women’s perverse natures by male writers such as Robert Gould triggered defences of the female sex by women writers including Mary Astell, Bathsua Makin, Sarah Figes, Anne Finch, Judith Drake, and Mary More. These women focused on the need for women’s education and their legal situation within marriage.

The essay explores several aspects of print textuality as they inform the reading (and reading aloud) of poetry, and show how poets including Anne Finch and Alexander Pope exploited these resources. Print poets used page space to create effects of luxuriousness and show, or to evoke a form such as the sonnet only to reverse it with the structure of the couplet poem. Late seventeenth and eighteenth-century couplet poetry tussled with an idealization of neoclassical parallel and balance on the one hand and a suspicion of regulation and regime on the other. This ‘twoness’ was elaborated formally as couplet poems created antitheses and parallels through rhyme, syntax and caesura breaks. This essay will reveal couplet poetry to be a verse form not of repetition and regulation, but an interrogation- often a flouting- of these emergent values in English literature.

This chapter makes the case that the second Viscount Conway was the greatest English private book collector of his day, with a collection of some 13,000 volumes and a network of book-buying agents across Europe. Conway’s Irish library was burned by rebels in 1641, and his London library sequestered by Parliamentary forces in 1636, but catalogues of both collections survive, and information is recorded here about their ownership by the first Earl of Conway and by Sir George Rawdon. The chapter begins with an account of a copy of Donne’s Satyres in manuscript among the Conway Papers, showing their links to the Percy library at Petworth. It ends with an analysis of a remarkable manuscript of ballads now in the Huntington Library: this volume, in a number of different hands, represents Conway’s literary, ‘Cavalier’, response to the eruption of Civil War.