Anne Finch and Her Poetry: A Critical Biography [Hardcover]

BARBARA McGOVERN (1940–2016) was a professor of English at Ohio State University, Mansfield, where she taught for more than 35 years and was frequently recognized for her outstanding research, teaching, and service. She is the author of Anne Finch and Her Poetry: A Critical Biography and an editor of The Anne Finch Wellesley Manuscript Poems: A Critical Edition. Her writings have appeared in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography; Poetry Criticism; British Women Writers; Pope, Swift, and Women Writers; the Victorian Newsletter 72; and more.

Anne Finch and Her Poetry is the first major critical examination of the life and works of the foremost English woman poet of the eighteenth century. This biography places Anne Finch (1661-1720) in her social and literary milieu and includes discussion of such topics as love and marriage, female friendships, melancholy, and nature as they relate both to Finch's life and to her poetry.

Barbara McGovern gives considerable attention to the methods by which Finch developed her artistry and molded a largely masculine literary tradition to her own designs through a variety of rhetorical and stylistic devices. She examines the entire body of Finch's work, including two verse plays and a number of previously unpublished poems and letters, and corrects numerous misconceptions about the poet and her work.

Though recognized in her lifetime as a talented poet, for nearly two hundred years Finch has been overlooked or, when anthologized, misrepresented. McGovern focuses on the historical place and displacement of Finch in Restoration and early eighteenth-century England in terms of her involvement with Britain's most critical religious and political controversies. An Anglican and Royalist who along with her husband was attaclÓÏ