SOURCE: Rumbold, Valerie. “The Alienated Insider: Mary Leapor in ‘Crumble Hall.’” British Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies 19, no. 1 (spring 1996): 63-76.

In the following essay, Rumbold regards Leapor's “Crumble Hall” to be a work of dissent that uses the traditional “country house” poem to convey the perspective of a working-class woman.

Mary Leapor's ‘Crumble Hall’ constitutes an obviously unusual contribution to the tradition of the country house poem in England.¹ It may even seem not to belong to the tradition at all, if we take seriously the definition proposed by Alastair Fowler: ‘“Country house poems”, so called, are not about houses: a better label is “estate poems”’; for ‘Crumble Hall’ appears to be very much about a house.² Yet Fowler's definition is useful precisely for underlining a reversal of expected procedure on Leapor's part which goes along with her sharing of some of the tradition's major concerns: while a typical...