The Poems of Anne Finch: A Critical Edition

FAIN: FB-53134-07

Jennifer Marie Keith
University of North Carolina, Greensboro (Greensboro, NC 27412-5068)

This project constructs a critical edition of the poems of Anne Kingsmill Finch, Countess of Winchilsea (1661-1720). Finch has been lauded as one of the most significant poets of eighteenth-century England, but an edition that collects all of her known poems has never been published. In an era renowned for its public and political poetry, Finch profoundly reoriented poetic and political authority from her position as a female aristocrat once at the center of the court and then for more than twenty years a political exile dependent on material support from family and friends. Her critiques of national politics and gender relations combine public and private concerns and range from satire to lyric.