The poems of Jean Adam, 1704-65

Abstract

Jean Adam was a lower-class eighteenth-century woman poet whose work has been unjustly neglected, even during the rediscovery of unprivileged writers in the last fifteen or so years. When her name has been cited, this has most often been as the disputed author of a song that she cannot be proved to have written, while her only collection of poems, in which it does not appear, has been largely ignored. This article presents new biographical information and provides a systematic account of the collection, Miscellany Poems (1734), arguing that it is organised on principles partly of theme and partly of verse form. Through detailed analysis of the volume's construction, including close discussion of key poems, it shows both that Adam was a more self-aware and a more skilful poet than has been recognised, and that there is a basic tension in her work between the constraints imposed by her faith and social position and her invention and aspirations as a writer. It ends by discussing the song often attributed to her and the questions raised by its disputed authorship, but maintains that Adam has to be appraised on the basis of the poems she is known to have written, which are here considered in detail for the first time.