SOURCE: Greene, Richard. “Problems of the Woman Poet,” and “Primitivism and Education.” In Mary Leapor: A Study in Eighteenth-Century Women's Poetry, pp. 38-97; 157-85. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993.

In the first excerpt which follows, Greene analyzes Leapor's attitudes towards issues of gender and domesticity, female friendship, and standards of feminine beauty. In the second excerpt, Greene examines Leapor's poetry in the context of the vogue for the works of “natural poets” during her time.

Problems of the Woman Poet

The poet was a member of polite society addressing himself to his equals, and though poetry was a special mode of communication it did not exempt him from all the normal usages of polite society. If you invited him to make one at a dinner-party, you expected him to talk intelligibly; if he published a volume of poems you expected him to write the sort of thing that the average...