By Robert C. Evans
June 10, 2019
Sarah Fyge Egerton (1668-1723) is an intriguing poet who wrote a great deal of poetry during a period when women poets were relatively rare. Her career also began at an astonishingly early age: she was barely fourteen years old when one of her poems was first printed in London. Throughout much of ...
Edited
By Julia J. Smith
February 15, 2010
Susanna Hopton was born in 1627 to a wealthy mercantile family. By 1651 she was collaborating with her future husband Richard Hopton in his activities as a royalist agent and around the same time she was converted to Roman Catholicism by Henry Turberville, a secular priest and distinguished ...
Edited
By Teresa Feroli
April 15, 2011
In 1625 Lady Eleanor Davies' life took a dramatic turn when, by her account in 1641, a "Heavenly voice" told her "There is Ninteene yeares and a halfe to the day of Judgement, and you as the meek Virgin". That same year she published her first treatise, A Warning to the Dragon, initiating her ...
Edited
By Teresa Feroli
April 15, 2011
In 1625 Lady Eleanor Davies' life took a dramatic turn when, by her account in 1641, a "Heavenly voice" told her "There is Ninteene yeares and a halfe to the day of Judgement, and you as the meek Virgin". That same year she published her first treatise, A Warning to the Dragon, initiating her ...
Edited
By Arthur F. Marotti
September 04, 2009
Gertrude More belongs to a tradition of mystical writers who believed in the value of the via negativa, a path to union with God by way of total self-abnegation and the emptying of the mind of set ideas and images. Her only book-length work, THE SPIRITVAL EXERCISES (Paris, 1658), is a collection ...
By Robert C. Evans
June 17, 2009
Jane Barker (1652-1732) is increasingly being recognised as one of the most important English women writers of the late-seventeenth and early-eighteenth centuries. The author of both poems and novels (including novels containing numerous poems), Barker was largely ignored for many years but has ...
Edited
By Katharine Gillespie
September 25, 2009
Katherine Chidley was a religious and political activist who dissented from the established church throughout the 1620s, 30s and 40s; supported the parliamentarian cause against the royalists during the English civil wars of the 1640s; and sided with the proto-democratic Levellers against the more ...