Daniels, Rosemary2013-11-082013-11-0820042004Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 66-05, Section: A, page: 1778.http://hdl.handle.net/10393/29093http://dx.doi.org/10.20381/ruor-12765This dissertation examines a group of female writers in the eighteenth century, the Countess of Winchilsea, Sarah Fyge, Mary Chudleigh, Elizabeth Singer Rowe, Mary Collier, Mary Leapor, Ann Yearsley, and Anna Barbauld, who reconfigured elements of an authoritative generic mode, the georgic. In undertaking this reconfiguration these women developed their own distinctive tradition of verse which I describe as a portrayal of a beata femina . The poetry of the beata femina acknowledges the separate sphere to which eighteenth-century mores restricted women and privileges the life of that sphere. Thus the narrative of the beatus vir is not figured as an appeal to rural retirement so much as a gendered escape from a male dominated world into a female life of the mind. The traditional affirmation of the georgic labour of the estate is transformed into a testimony of domestic labour. The country-house poem is rewritten to celebrate the women who give it life, while the topographical survey is reordered as a means for women to survey their own narratives. However, the most significant way in which these women establish a sense of a beata femina within georgically inflected verse is through their employment of time. Women's poetry in this mode self-consciously rejects both the seasonal cycles and sense of historic progression associated with the georgic. Instead, women describe short periods of time within their quotidian lives in which they experience pleasure, connect to nature or other women, and, often, achieve transcendent experiences which seem to stand outside time.333 p.enWomen's Studies.Literature, English.Thesis