SOURCE: “Introduction: Alexander Pope, Literary Creativity, and Eighteenth-Century Women,” in Alexander Pope and His Eighteenth-Century Women Readers, Southern Illinois University Press, 1994, pp. 1-18.

In the following essay, Thomas demonstrates how a variety of eighteenth-century women responded to Pope's poetry in terms of cultural issues surrounding their ability to create literary art, focusing on the significance of the natural settings of Twickenham as a symbol of literary creativity for both Pope and his female audience.

Alexander Pope's rhetorical constructions of femininity have stimulated recent critical debate. Such studies as Laura Brown's Marxist Alexander Pope (1985) and Ellen Pollak's feminist The Poetics of Sexual Myth: Gender and Ideology in the Verse of Swift and Pope (1985) have analyzed Pope's poems from specific, late twentieth-century points of view.¹ Their perspectives emphasize Pope's role as a spokesperson for his culture, both writers arraigning him for opinions less defensible today than 250 years ago. Pope appears...