SOURCE: "Anne Finch: A Woman Poet and the Tradition," in Gender at Work, edited and introduced by Ann Messenger, Wayne State University Press, 1990, pp. 34-76.

In the following excerpt, Mallinson discusses how Finch's position on the margins of eighteenth-century society influenced her poetry.

The relation of literary theory to practice in the Restoration and early eighteenth century is problematical and variously interpreted. The fact that Anne Finch was a woman writer attempting to adapt her talents to a literary tradition from which women's voices were almost absent made her position as a writer in her time idiosyncratic. If Earl Miner is correct in seeing in the Restoration a shift from the private and coterie to the public mode, and if critics of the period are right in their consensus that satire sets the dominant tone in the literature of the time, then Anne Finch's work is marginal to...