Although she enjoyed some fame during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Anne Finch, Countess of Winchilsea, has only recently received greater praise and renewed attention as a poet. Her diverse and considerable body of poems record her private thoughts and personal struggles but illustrate as well her awareness of the social and political climate of her age. Not only do Finch's poems reveal a sensitive mind and a religious soul, but the body of her work exhibits great generic range and demonstrates her fluent use of Augustan diction and forms.

Descended from an ancient Hampshire family, Finch was born in April 1661, the third and youngest child of Anne Haselwood and Sir William Kingsmill. Her father died when she was five months old. Her mother soon remarried and bore another daughter, Dorothy, to whom Finch remained close throughout her life. When Anne Haselwood died, her second husband, Sir Thomas...