Epic “apply’d”: Mary Leapor’s “Crumble Hall” and the Epic Mode

Abstract

ABSTRACT Women’s involvement in the reception history of the epic genre is largely unwritten. This article explores how women writers of the period used the mock heroic to write of their own histories and experiences. I propose that three distinct developments in the eighteenth-century literary landscape influenced the engagement of women writers with epic: an increasing confidence to enter the works of Homer and Virgil from the margins; the centring of women in fragmentary translations in miscellany volumes; and the rise of the mock-heroic, which diluted the boundaries between traditional and innovative topics apt for epic application. Mary Leapor, a working-class poet and kitchen maid, is not a figure naturally associated with writing in the epic mode. However, I argue that her poetry constitutes an experiment with this mode and is emblematic of the changes to eighteenth-century literary culture that opened out the classics to many readers. But where the mock-heroic often trivialised women, Leapor’s mock country-house poem, “Crumble Hall” (1751), uses the classical space of the underworld to write of, elevate, and celebrate not warriors and heroes but the labouring classes. Leapor is a surprising but vital exemplar in the reception history of both the classics and epic poetry.