Poems By Ephelia C 1679

The first scholarly edition of a long-lost pseudonymous Restoration writer. Includes a lengthy critical essay, six appendices, & 19 illustrations.

The first scholarly edition of a long-lost pseudonymous Restoration writer. Includes a lengthy critical essay, six appendices, & 19 illustrations.

The specially commissioned essays in Women and Poetry, 1660-1750 address the multiplicity of female poetic practice and the public image of the woman poet between the Restoration and mid-eighteenth century. The volume includes biographically informative accounts of individual poets alongside detailed essays which discuss the different contexts and poetic traditions shaping women's poetry in this key period in literary history. Women and Poetry, 1660-1750 draws together a wealth of recent scholarship from a strong cast of contributors (including Germaine Greer) into one accessible volume aimed at both students and specialist readers.

This anthology represents a re-examination of its field, based on extensive archival research. Each woman's work is accompanied by a headnote which combines biographic information with some guidance as to the context, intended audience and genre.

Increasingly Aphra Behn—the first woman professional writer—is also regarded as one of the most important writers of the 17th century. The Rover, her most famous and most accomplished play, is in many ways firmly in the tradition of Restoration drama; Willmore, the title character, is a rake and a libertine, and the comedy feeds on sexual innuendo, intrigue and wit. But the laughter that the play insights has a biting edge to it and the sexual intrigue an unsettling depth. As Anne Russell points out in her introduction to this edition, there are three options for women in the society represented in The Rover: marriage, the convent, or prostitution. In this marriage economy the witty and pragmatic virgin Hellena learns how to survive, while the prostitute Angellica Bianca can retain her autonomy only so long as she remains free from romantic love. It seems that in this world women can only be free by the anonymity of disguise—yet the mask is also the mark of the prostitute. And, paradoxically, disguise is the device that in many ways drives the plot towards marriage. Enormously popular through the eighteenth century, The Rover is now once again widely performed. Filled with the play of ideas, it is one of the most amusing, entertaining—and unsettling—of comedies.

This volume offers an account of English literary culture in one of its most volatile and politically engaged moments. From the work of Milton and Marvell in the 1650s and 1660s through the brilliant careers of Dryden, Rochester, and Behn, Locke and Astell, Swift and Defoe, Pope and Montagu, the pressures and extremes of social, political, and sexual experience are everywhere reflected in literary texts: in the daring lyrics and intricate political allegories of this age, in the vitriol and bristling topicality of its satires as well as in the imaginative flight of its mock epics, fictions, and heroic verse. The volume's chronologies and select bibliographies will guide the reader through texts and events, while the fourteen essays commissioned for this Companion will allow us to read the period anew.

This collection of sixteen essays considers evidence for the array of women's alliances in early modern England. The inclusions range over a variety of communities, households, and court -- and consider classes of women from vagabonds to queens to explore the traces of women's connections.These clear and Lively interdisciplinary essays, combining literary and historical methods and materials, are informed by feminism, queer theory, and studies of racer in the early modern period.

This facsimile edition reproduces the extant works of the seventeenth-century poet, 'Ephelia'. By tradition, the identity of 'Ephelia' has been a long-contested debate in English letters. In her extended Introductory Note, Maureen Mulvihill culls evidence from the 'Ephelia' texts and from contemporary sources to show that the most likely candidate is Mary Villiers, later Stuart, Duchess of Richmond and Lennox (1622-1685). The volume opens with the reproduction of A Poem To His Sacred Majesty, On the Plot... (1678) from the copy held at the Bodleian Library. This is a large broadsheet poem prompted by The Popish Plot, expressing support for King Charles II. A new addition to the corpus of 'Ephelia's work is a variant of this 1678 parent-text, displaying a woodcut printer's ornament (factotum, with inset typepiece 'H'), which may hold special significance. This volume reproduces the copy preserved at the Huntington Library, and supplies with the facsimile an enlarged image of the ornament. Female Poems on several Occasions (1679) offers a rich variety of material: political verse, excerpted material from the poet's 'lost' play, love poetry and coterie verse critical of the moral decline of the Stuart court. The copy of the book reproduced here is that preserved at the Folger Shakespeare Library. The final printed work in the volume is Advice To His Grace ([1681]) in which 'Ephelia' admonishes the Duke of Monmouth and advocates the purity of the Stuart line and the integrity of the Stuart succession. The copy reproduced here is preserved at the Beinecke Library. The volume concludes with three appendices: two Van Dyck portraits of Lady Mary Villiers; a signed manuscript elegy, preserved at Nottingham, with an enlarged image of its armorial watermark; and the title-page of the poet's Female Poems (1682).