Lactilla Milkwoman Of Clifton

Ann Yearsley was an English poet, playwright, and novelist who lived most of her life in a village near Bristol. Though she began her adult life as a milkwoman she later became the chief support of her family through her writing and proprietorship of a circulating library. This literary biography offers the most thoroughly researched and reasoned account to date of the complex political and social causes of Yearsley's gradual exclusion from the annals of literature. Yearsley published her first volume of poetry in 1785 with the support of Hannah More and other members of the "Bluestocking" circle, who regarded her as something of a primitive savant. Soon thereafter, however, Yearsley broke with her patrons in a bitter dispute regarding the book's profits. Although condemned for ingratitude by More and her friends, Yearsley continued to publish with the support of more liberal members of the establishment. Nevertheless, the more conservative counsels prevailed as events in France from 1789 demonstrated the dangers of popular political agitation. Although Yearsley consistently rejected such activity, her perceived status tended to label her at least potentially subversive. Consequently, most commentary on her work during her later writing life and the century after her death portrayed her primarily as the ungrateful protégée of the more acceptable More, and mistakenly associated her with such avowed radicals as Mary Wollstonecraft. Although present-day Marxist and feminist theorists deserve much credit for revitalizing interest in Yearsley, says Mary Waldron, the writer has often been just as misrepresented or misunderstood by her modern champions, being celebrated for the very qualities or tendencies erroneously attributed to her by earlier readers and critics. With the publication of this broad literary-historical study, a more complete picture of Yearsley, as an individual and on her own terms, emerges.

In Britain, the period that stretches from the middle of the eighteenth century to the mid-nineteenth century marks the emergence of the working classes, alongside and in response to the development of the middle-class public sphere. This collection contributes to that scholarship by exploring the figure of the "working-class intellectual," who both assimilates the anti-authoritarian lexicon of the middle classes to create a new political and cultural identity, and revolutionizes it with the subversive energy of class hostility. Through considering a broad range of writings across key moments of working-class self-expression, the essays reevaluate a host of familiar writers such as Robert Burns, John Thelwall, Charles Dickens, Charles Kingsley, Ann Yearsley, and even Shakespeare, in terms of their role within a working-class constituency. The collection also breaks fresh ground in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century scholarship by shedding light on a number of unfamiliar and underrepresented figures, such as Alexander Somerville, Michael Faraday, and the singer Ned Corvan.

This study offers a timely and necessary reassessment of the careers of Ann Yearsley and Hannah More. Making use of newly-discovered letters and poems, Andrews provides a full analysis of the breakdown of the two writers’ affiliation and compares it to other labouring-class relationships based on patronage.

Presents the works of Ann Yearsley, a laboring-class poet' whose writing forms part of an under-represented area of romanticism. This work includes her play "Earl Goodwin" and novel "The Royal Captives".

Lactilla Tends her Fav'rite Cow benefits from the foundations set by earlier studies of laboring-class writers even as it extends their conclusions through the use of an explicitly ecocritical perspective."--BOOK JACKET.

Novel Histories: British Women Writing History, 1760-1830 explores issues of historical and literary genres, historiography, and the gendering of civic and literary roles. It demonstrates the new and sometimes subversive ways that women authors pushed the limits of writing history in order to participate in contemporary national civic life otherwise closed to them.

In recent years the canon of eighteenth-century poetry has greatly expanded to include women poets, labouring-class and provincial poets, and many previously unheard voices. Fairer’s book takes up the challenge this ought to pose to our traditional understanding of the subject. This book seeks to question some of the structures, categories, and labels that have given the age its reassuring shape in literary history. In doing so Fairer offers a fresh and detailed look at a wide range of material.

This study discusses the representation of class in poetry in English from Britain and Ireland between the fourteenth and twenty-first centuries, and the effect of class on the production, dissemination, and reception of that poetry. It looks at the factors which enable and obstruct the production of poetry, such as literacy, education, patronage, prejudice, print, and the various alleged revivals of poetry in Britain, and the relationship between class and poetic form. Whilst this is a survey that cannot be comprehensive, it offers a number of case-studies of poets and poems from each period considered.