ABSTRACT
During her lifetime, reception of Ann Yearsley’s poetry and prose was indeed tainted by what the Monthly Review in 1791 so pointedly called “vulgar wonderment,” wonderment on the part of reviewers, publishers, and patrons alike, since her very existence as a literary woman simultaneously provoked amazement and derision. This chapter illustrates the tension between poetic protest and performance, Yearsley’s speaker spends the next 165 lines contradicting that single statement. Yearsley was not alone in devoting her energies to grappling with the questions of education; those concerned with educational reform ranged from social reformers and clergy to publishers and philosophers to novelists and poets. Just as she transforms middle-class desire for her own purposes, so too does she transform canonical literature, simultaneously reminding readers of her own hard-won literary education. Poems on Several Occasions is more than an interesting anecdote in Yearsley’s career and more than a specimen of note in the history of literary patronage.
