Introduction -- Changing contexts -- Systems, gender, and persistent issues -- Agency and the "marked marker" -- Anne Finch and what women wrote -- The social and the formal -- Anne Finch and popular poetry -- Poetry on poetry -- The spleen as legacy -- Women and poetry in the public eye -- Poetry as news and critique -- The woman question -- Elizabeth Singer Rowe -- Hymns, narratives, and innovations in religious poetry -- The voice of paraphrase -- The hymn as personal lyric -- Religious poetry as subversive narrative -- Devout soliloquies -- Friendship poems -- The legacy of Katherine Philips -- Encouragement and the counteruniverse -- Jane Brereton -- Adaptation and ideology -- Retirement poetry -- Beyond convention -- Memory, time, and Elizabeth Carter -- Reflection and difference -- The elegy -- What did women write? -- Representative composers: Darwall and Seward -- The elegy and same-sex desire -- Entertainment and forgetting -- The sonnet, Charlotte Smith, and what women wrote -- The sonnet and the political -- Sonnet sequences -- Women poets and the spread of the sonnet -- The emigrants, conversations, and Beachy Head -- Smith as transitional poet.