ABSTRACT
The author was an Irish poet and satirist. Of that early poetry, one poem ‘A Poem, On Good Friday, Written in the Author’s Twelfth Year’ was included in her 1791 collection The Protected Fugitives. Samuel Johnson endorsed her work enthusiastically, but the publication of Protected Fugitives was delayed on account of Johnson’s death in 1784, serious illness for both the author and her husband around that same time and the death of her son in September of 1789. Although the poems in the collection vary in subject and form, the poems included are revolve around family and are among the most personal in the collection. Those poems differ, however, from ‘An Elegy, On the Death of the Author’s Child’ and ‘An Elegy, On the Author’s Son, who Departed this Life, the Third Day of September, 1789’, both of which address the author’s own family tragedies.
