This essay looks at satires of the literary marketplace written by three non-elite female poets: Mary Barber (1685–1755), Mary Jones (1707–78), and Elizabeth Hands (1746–1815). Writing outside the urban marketplace and living with heightened financial precarity, these women did not market their volumes directly in a London commercial space. Rather, these poets sold their collections by subscription, cultivating potential patrons, subscribers, and readers through personal connections across provincial, non-London networks. Their rich satires draw on the keenly felt challenges of attracting a sufficient number of subscribers, a process that essentially moves the public literary marketplace into more private, often domestic, space shaped by individual relationships and social networks. A distinctly different kind of literary satire results, one focused on private interactions, particular utterances, and domestic gatherings. This essay examines satiric poems by Barber, Jones, and Hands, and suggests that the female poet’s perspective gained from their proximity produces effective satire both of the specific individuals the women encounter and of the cultural attitudes those individuals represent. Within the very material object marking these women’s success – the published volume in the reader’s hands – these four verse satires document the precarity of their situation and their perilous path to publication by subscription.

This chapter examines the variety of ways in which women poets in early eighteenth-century Ireland negotiated expectations of gender. It focuses on Mary Barber’s Poems on Several Occasions (1735), a volume containing work by several other writers, most notably six poems by Constantia Grierson (c. 1705–1732). Female poets tempered the appearance of poetic ambition by means of several strategies. In Barber’s case the best known of these is ventriloquism, in the various poems she wrote to be spoken by her young son. Both Barber and Grierson firmly place their work in the context of decorous female sociability by emphasising its occasional nature: particularly noteworthy being the ruse of presenting poems not as distinguished artefacts, but as supplementary objects, in the several poems taking the form of ‘lines written’ in books. Ambition can, however, be discerned. Barber sought and gained significant patrons in Jonathan Swift and the Earl of Orrery, and successfully raised an impressive subscription list. More subtly, the volume as a whole also shows each poet help to secure the poetic reputation of the other through an elaborate poetics of compliment, reflecting self-consciously on female authorship.