Mary Leapor is distinguished by her capacity for being discovered again and again. The daughter of a Northamptonshire gardener, Leapor first went into service as a scullery maid and then kept house for her father after her mother's death; she had little formal education and was repeatedly described by eighteenth-century readers, who knew only of her obscurity, as representative of that prized poetic character of the period, the plebeian prodigy. Her works were collected and published posthumously by subscription in 1748 and 1751. There were notices or selected republications of her poems by Christopher Smart in the Midwife (1750), by the Monthly Review (1749 and 1751), by George Colman and Bonnell Thornton in Poems by Eminent Ladies (1755), by the Lady's Poetical Magazine (1782), by the Gentleman's Magazine (1784), by Alexander Dyce in Specimens of British Poetesses (1827), by Blackwood's Magazine (1837), by Frederic Rowton in The Female Poets of Great Britain (1848), and by Roger Lonsdale in The...