SOURCE: "The Political Origins of Anne Finch's Poetry," in Huntington Library Quarterly, Vol. LIV, No. 4, Fall, 1991, pp. 327-51.

In the following excerpt, Barash discusses the relationship between gender and politics in Finch's poetry.

Like so many of the poems written to and about English monarchs between the public execution of Charles I in 1649 and the death of his granddaughter, Queen Anne, in 1714, Finch's "Elegy on the Death of King James" suggests the awkward relationship between the embattled monarch's material body and the authority of poetry which attempts to uphold the idea of monarchy even as it attacks one or more of the living claimants to the throne. By the late seventeenth century, and particularly in light of the inability of the last of the Protestant Stuarts—James II's daughters, Mary II and Anne—to produce living heirs, political writing emphasized questions of reproduction and the body, which overlapped...