SOURCE: Landry, Donna. “An English Sappho brilliant, young and dead? Mary Leapor laughs at the fathers.” In Muses of Resistance: Labouring-Class Women's Poetry in Britain, 1739-1796, pp. 78-119. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990.

In the following essay, Landry discusses Leapor as a more radically feminist poet than earlier critics have recognized.

But no Englishwoman ever wrote verses worthy of being twice read, who had deviated from virtue.

(Blackwood's Magazine [March, 1837], p. 408)

Sappho, Justified, either way

(Ann Yearsley, ms. note in a copy of Poems, on Several Occasions [1785])

Mary Leapor's texts have evidently appealed to a predominantly male literary establishment, for various critics and editors seem to have taken a peculiar pleasure in discovering them, only to have them be forgotten and subsequently rediscovered again and again. Under the auspices of John Watts, Samuel Richardson, and Isaac Hawkins Browne, her works were collected and published posthumously by subscription in 1748 and...