SOURCE: Rizzo, Betty. “Molly Leapor: An Anxiety for Influence.” The Age of Johnson: A Scholarly Annual, edited by Paul J. Korshin, pp. 313-43. New York: AMS Press, 1991.

In the following essay, Rizzo offers an overview of Leapor's life and writings.

Molly Leapor was one of the eighteenth-century natural poets—sometimes called peasant poets, or primitives—whose work was taken to be illustrative of the genius provided by nature unassisted by art. Well known in her own time, she was forgotten until recently when there have again been stirrings of interest in her work and her career.¹ To what purpose might we investigate them now? As a virtually uneducated woman, a member of the servant class, born with literary talent, she must attract the interest of literary scholars, critics, and historians, of feminists, of social historians. Again, her story provides an interesting contribution to a study of eighteenth-century patronage...