SOURCE: "Anne Finch, Countess of Winchilsea: An Augustan Woman Poet," in Shakespeare's Sisters: Feminist Essays on Women Poets, edited by Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, Indiana University Press, 1979, pp. 32-46.

In the following excerpt, Rogers discusses Finch's depiction of women and her use of eighteenth-century poetic forms.

Anne Finch, Countess of Winchilsea (1661-1720), is important not only as a gifted poet but as a unique example—a poet who was both a woman and an Augustan. In many ways a typical Augustan, she wrote in all the traditional genres, from flippant songs to ponderous Pindaric odes. Yet because she was a woman, her poems are subtly different from those of her male contemporaries. She shows a distinctive sincerity in her love poetry, a distinctive standard in her satire, a distinctive simplicity in her response to nature, and a distinctive freedom from the Augustan writer's obligation to make...