Mary Leapor:
A Digital Edition of Mary Leapor's Poetry
Laura Mandell1

Joseph Highmore, painting, Pamela Fainting, 1743
Joseph Highmore, Pamela Fainting, 1743

The laboring-class poet Mary Leapor was compared by her contemporaries to Samuel Richardson's Pamela. It is a rather astonishing comparison given the biting satire of the upper classes in her poetry (see for example "Upon her Play being returned to her, stained with Claret." Why were they unable to see the writer as anything but a meek Pamela, painted by Joseph Highmore in 1773 (to the left)? Did they not actually read her poetry? Or perhaps it was an advertising ploy? More about Leapor ...

the Title Page of Mary Leapor's poetry, volume 2
Courtesy of the Internet Archive.2
the Title Page of Poems by Eminent Ladies, Vol. 1, 1755
Courtesy of Wikimedia.3

Notes

1. I first put Mary Leapor's "Crumble Hall" online while a professor at Miami University of Ohio. Apparently those poems are still available (with typos!), but I no longer have any control over them. Back

2. Cover and Title Page, [ed. Isaac Browne] (London : Printed: and sold by J. Roberts in Warwick-Lane). Back

3. Title page of Poems by Eminent Ladies 2 Vols. (London: R. Baldwin, 1755), CC0, via Wikimedia Commons. Back