Ann Yearsley: A Literary Career Reconsidered

In her lifetime, Ann Yearsley was viewed with a mixture of admiration and distaste; an accomplished writer of many literary styles, Yearsley's spectacular break from her first patron and discoverer would, for many, cast a shadow over her subsequent successes. More recently, critics have often divided into those who admire Yearsley as a poet of immense talent, and those who see her as an ambitious and ungrateful woman, resentful of all that her first patron, Hannah More, had done on her behalf. This article will reconsider these attitudes towards Yearsley and her eventful literary career and suggest that the more nuanced approach to her work taken by a new generation of Yearsley scholars must be developed if her writing is to receive the recognition it has long deserved. I will argue that the relationship between More and Yearsley needs to be considered within the context and long‐standing tradition of patronage and the increasing professionalism of writing. I will also consider Yearsley's later works, and argue that their neglect is a direct consequence of some critics’ refusal to look beyond the first eighteen months of a literary career that would endure for more than a decade, and which would survive one of the most turbulent periods of European history.