Memory and the eighteenth-century female poet

As the richly diverse papers of the 2017 BAKEA conference at Sivas have demonstrated, memory is central to our very existence as human beings. Memory -- whether cultural, historical, collective or personal -- is a source of identity, of motivation, of pleasure, pain and regret. Yet to what extent, this paper will consider, is memory gendered? Do male and female writers write about memory in similar or different ways? Within the poetry of the eighteenth century, male and female responses to memory are strikingly differentiated. Women poets of this period do not often make poems out of personal memories, especially childhood memories, and when they do, it is rarely with a sense of pleasure, fulfilment or recognition of the movement from youth to maturity. Memory, for the eighteenth-century female poet, is frequently associated with trauma, loss, and curtailment of potential – self-erasure rather than self-progression. In 1788 Ann Yearsley, the laboring class poet whose poetic career represented a triumph over poverty, conflict and degradation, rounded her long topographical poem ‘Clifton Hill’ with a penultimate couplet, ‘Memory, ’tis a strain, / Which fills my soul with sympathetic pain’. The harshly monosyllabic rhyme of ‘strain’ and ‘pain’ seems to encapsulate the trauma that writing about memory can induce in women