At the beginning of the eighteenth century, many women writers bemoaned their restricted access to the classics. Through the culture of translation that had been pioneered by John Dryden and the changing literary market of the eighteenth century, however, women readers were able to receive the classics and offered their own adaptations of this ancient material. This thesis outlines the methods of mediation that enabled women to access the classics. Considering the role of the fragment, mythical topoi and the mock-heroic in relation to the reception of Horace, Ovid, and Homer and Virgil respectively, the chapters of this thesis explore the significant use of the classics in women’s poetry of the eighteenth century as a marker of the pervasive presence of the Graeco-Roman world in eighteenth-century society and culture. In 1700 women mourned the death of Dryden in part because of his seminal role in translating the classics; however, by the 1750s, the endpoint of the thesis, women were increasingly recognised as classicists in their own right. This thesis traces this transformation. The women writers here examined are from across the British Isles and from a range of social classes. The writing considered is in both printed and manuscript forms, and wherever possible the biographical contexts of individual women that explain the ways in which they accessed the classics – such as detailing personal libraries or suggesting some of the single volumes the women may have owned or read – are outlined. What emerges throughout this thesis is a national counter-narrative that explores how women found opportunities to experiment with the modes and mythos of the ancient world, and the ways in which they made the classics their own
