ABSTRACT
English writers took what they wanted from the movement and discarded the rest — generally quietly, but and then with a certain jingoistic flourish, as in John Dryden and John Dennis. It is not surprising that writers should have succumbed to the prevailing ethos and should often have allied themselves with the landed proprietors who held so much power in national life. Few writers stayed on at the universities — the academic poet or novelist is a modern development. Regrettably, it is equally the case that eighteenth-century society offered a pitiful array of chances for women fully to express themselves. In the middle and upper orders of society, many women had enough leisure to regret their enforced idleness. The artist, then, had to find his place in a sharply graduated society, with steep divisions in status, income and power.
