Women Poets and the Mock-Heroic Elegy

Abstract

Discussion of mock-heroic verse has focused predominantly on the works of Augustan male poets, with Anna Laetitia Barbauld’s ‘Washing Day’ (1797), arguably, being the most widely analysed female-authored example of this mode.¹ Attention on this poem, and its supplication to the ‘domestic Muse’, can be attributed to the recent critical interest in the ‘poeticising [of] the domestic’ and, as Adeline Johns-Putra considers, ‘the way in which so much of […] [the] work [of late eighteenth-century women poets] foregrounds, even celebrates, the homely, the private and, as such, the resolutely un-poetic’.² From the early 1700s, though, Jane Spencer notes that women were coming up against ‘a new ideology of femininity’ which meant that ‘women were more highly valued [than in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries], but also more confined to a special feminine sphere, as guardians of the home and of moral and emotional values’.³ Despite this sense of restriction, Paula Backscheider stresses that ‘women were writing all of the kinds of poetry that men were’ and, throughout the century, female poets, such as Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Elizabeth Thomas, Mary Jones, Sarah Dixon and Anna Seward, were employing the mock-heroic to explore a variety of themes, including illness and the loss of beauty it can cause (Montagu in ‘Saturday: The Small-Pox’ [wr. 1716; pub. 1747]), false lovers (Dixon in ‘Cloe to Aminta.