Mary Evelyn’s Mundus Muliebris: Or, the Ladies Dressing Room Unlock’d, and her Toilette Spread was written before 1685 and published anonymously in 1690. The poem, accompanied by a preface and a dictionary of “hard and foreign names, and Terms of the Art Cosmetick,” aroused enough interest to require a second issue and a second edition within a year, followed by yet another edition in 1700. Significant textual evidence supports the claim that later male satirists borrowed without acknowledgement from her work. Further, significant evidence from the Evelyn family papers supports the claim that the teenage author, eulogized by her father John Evelyn as exceptional in her piety, demurred from his angelic portrayal. Her published poem about an imaginary dressing room, in combination with unpublished documents found in her actual dressing room, and in contrast to male-authored works that borrowed from her, establishes a perspective on her single but significant contribution to the history of women and satire. Mundus Muliebris ridicules the marriage marketplace and its effects on women’s bodies and minds. Exposed to a prospective husband, the dressing room’s lavish space documents women’s involvement in that marketplace, in all its glittering, dehumanizing, disturbing, and at times disgusting detail.

In the 1730s Swift produced his most controversial poems (‘The Lady’s Dressing Room’, ‘A Beautiful Young Nymph Going to Bed’, ‘Strephon and Chloe’, and ‘Cassinus and Peter’). Often read as discomfiting scatological poems, these works have been grouped together as 'the unprintables', proof (some critics argue) of an increasingly depraved mind. My new interpretation treats the works in the context of Swift’s career-long fascination with the materiality of poetry. In the unprintables Swift messily mingles the conventions of ancient and Renaissance love poetry in an exposé of what he perceives to be the limitations of form itself. This chapter also places Swift’s most famous poem, 'Verses on the Death of Dr Swift', alongside his other self-portraits written between 1731 and 1733, including political satires and metapoems alike, from verse libels on Delany to 'On Poetry: A Rapsody' and ‘The Legion Club’. Odes, epistles, fables, ballads, verse libels, political satires, descriptive and narrative verses, imitations, auto-eulogies, elegies, rhapsodies, anti-erotica, peeping-tom poems, metapoems, and more: to the end, Swift kept reinventing himself and the poetry and poets around him.