Homosocial Women: Martha Sansom, Constantia Grierson, Mary Leapor and Georgic Verse Epistle

Abstract

Eighteenth-century poetry and poetics displays an intense interest in finessing relations between genre and mode. In an aesthetic climate which takes as axiomatic the complexities of kinship and affiliation between types of texts, types of authors and types of readers, theme, topic and trope are read as both highly portable and formally charged in their own right. This fascination with the conditions governing the mixing and grouping, management and distribution of richly nuanced textual materials, themselves hierarchically arrayed, finds one significant expression in the centrality of georgic allegory to a range of discursive practices and economies in the eighteenth century. The popularity of formal georgic such as Dyer’s ‘The Fleece’ (1757) and Grainger’s The Sugar Cane (1764), and the novelty value of georgic poems written by labourers, like Stephen Duck’s The Thresher’s Labour (1730), and Mary Collier’s reply, The Woman’s Labour: An Epistle to Mr Stephen Duck (1739), indicates only part of the far more diffuse, figural application of georgic rhetoric to sexual, social, ethical, aesthetic and economic discourses of cultivation, improvement and value.