ANNE FINCH AND LADY MARY MONTAGU AS “THIEVES OF LANGUAGE"

This paper explores the strategies of two eighteenth-century female poets to write and publish their poetry in an era when literature was dominated by male authors. In the eighteenth century, language and literature were considered male-dominated areas. For this reason, women had to face many obstacles to express themselves in literature and to be accepted as authors/poets. However, due to the critical shift from patronage to printing as a profit-making market, women’s writing displayed itself from almost non-existence. Still, the female authors/poets of the century such as Anne Finch and Lady Mary Montagu needed to fabricate various strategies to write, publish, and own the authorship of their own works. Thanks to those strategies, they were able to produce poems in the very language which was often associated with male authors and oppressed them. Hence, Anne Finch and Lady Mary Montagu can be defined as “thieves of language.” In this context, this paper analyzes Anne Finch’s “The Introduction” and Lady Mary Montagu’s “Verses Addressed to the Imitator of the First Satire of the Second Book of Horace” in the context of Neoclassical poetry by investigating how these two women poets generate different strategies to insert their own voice into the masculine literary tradition in the Augustan age. Finch’s “The Introduction” deals with her concerns on publishing her poems in the tradition that marginalizes and scorns women poets while Lady Montagu’s “Verses” strategically and severely attacks Alexander Pope, the leading figure of Neoclassical literature, by writing back in the same style as Pope.