Mary Collier appears to have been the first laboring-class woman to publish her poetry in England. So far as is known, the publication of her poems brought her little remuneration and no escape from her labors as a laundress, housekeeper, and farm worker in West Sussex and Hampshire. Her most important poem, The Woman's Labour: An Epistle To Mr. Stephen Duck (1739), is beginning to receive some scholarly attention, but until recently she was a poet almost entirely forgotten in literary history. The Woman's Labour is an important text for at least three reasons. First, the poem's appearance as early as 1739 suggests that English laboring-class feminism has a history that predates its usual association with the nineteenth century. Second, the poem demonstrates that a plebeian poet such as Collier can take aesthetic advantage of her distance from the dominant literary culture by filling a familiar vessel--the georgic or the...