Chapter 11 - The Province of Poetry: Women Poets in Early Eighteenth-Century Ireland

Summary

This chapter examines the variety of ways in which women poets in early eighteenth-century Ireland negotiated expectations of gender. It focuses on Mary Barber’s Poems on Several Occasions (1735), a volume containing work by several other writers, most notably six poems by Constantia Grierson (c. 1705–1732). Female poets tempered the appearance of poetic ambition by means of several strategies. In Barber’s case the best known of these is ventriloquism, in the various poems she wrote to be spoken by her young son. Both Barber and Grierson firmly place their work in the context of decorous female sociability by emphasising its occasional nature: particularly noteworthy being the ruse of presenting poems not as distinguished artefacts, but as supplementary objects, in the several poems taking the form of ‘lines written’ in books. Ambition can, however, be discerned. Barber sought and gained significant patrons in Jonathan Swift and the Earl of Orrery, and successfully raised an impressive subscription list. More subtly, the volume as a whole also shows each poet help to secure the poetic reputation of the other through an elaborate poetics of compliment, reflecting self-consciously on female authorship.