The publication of the first volume of the Cambridge Edition of the Works of Anne Finch, Countess of Winchilsea, is a major event in English literary studies. It is the first scholarly edition of Finch and, when complete, will make available in two volumes, supplemented by a complementary digital site (https://library.uncg.edu/dp/annefinch/), all the poet’s works as evidenced “by the archives that have survived . . . 232 poems, 2 plays, and a prose preface to her work.” The canon is mostly derived from three manuscript books and Finch’s only authorized print volume, published in 1713, though additional poems from disparate sources will be included and justified in the second volume. Volume 1, as the title indicates, reproduces the material of the early manuscript books (the Northamptonshire Manuscript and the Folger Manuscript), representing the years 1690–1704.Anne Finch has been and continues to be well served by her editors. Perhaps it is stretching the term a bit to call her husband, Heneage, her first editor, but it was he who transcribed his wife’s poetry (some of the Northamptonshire Manuscript, including its title page, and all of the Folger); it was he who corrected the page proofs of her printed volume; and it was he who, after her death in 1720, continued to watch over her work. In the early twentieth century, Myra Reynolds published the first edition of Finch since 1713 and, while limited in terms of its textual scholarship and dated by its editorial principles, the 1903 edition provided, until now, access to “the largest collection in print of Finch’s poems and her two plays,” along with an introduction “still valuable more than 100 years after its first printing.” In 1998, Barbara McGovern and Charles Hinnant published the Wellesley Manuscript, and both editors contributed important scholarship to Finch studies earlier in that decade, McGovern’s biography, and Hinnant’s critical study of the poetry. Along the way, there were proposed editions of Finch—and work toward those editions—the most important being that of Carol Barash, who abandoned the project but made her notes available as Keith began to take on the formidable task that has now come to fruition.Jennifer Keith’s meticulous “Textual Introduction” is a model of its kind. She carefully surveys the “intriguing problems” posed by the unique circumstances surrounding the preservation and distribution of Finch’s work and outlines the editorial choices and rationales that define this edition. Finch’s oeuvre is closely allied to and in many ways defined by her and her husband’s relationship to the court of James II and his queen, Mary of Modena (referred to as Mary Beatrice throughout). Anne Finch became Maid of Honor to Mary Beatrice in 1682, and Heneage was appointed Groom of the Bedchamber to James in 1683; the association continued through James’s accession, up to and beyond the revolution of 1688, which resulted in his exile to France, the arrest and trial of Heneage for treason in 1690 (a case dropped for want of evidence), and a life of internal exile for the Finches in Eastwell, Kent, thereafter. Finch’s poetry is, as this edition makes abundantly clear, poetry that is best understood as thoroughly inflected by a Jacobite sensibility—not the sort posited later by Walter Scott, but a sensibility that sprung from the political and social circumstances of Jacobite existence from 1688 through the reign of Queen Anne, one that emphasized the themes of “political isolation, personal loss, loyalty, and love.” These circumstances are important not only for fully understanding the motifs and preoccupations of Finch’s work; they are also directly relevant to the production of the texts and can shed light on versions of poems that exist in more than one of the authorized sources. Coterie circulation and reproduction means that certain of the poems in the manuscript books speak to “more explicit Jacobite sentiments” than we find in the variant versions of those poems in the 1713 volume. The reasons are not far to seek given the build-up of Jacobite activity prior to the 1715 rebellion. The Folger Manuscript, the most comprehensive collection of Finch’s work, is the preferred copy text of poems that exist in two or more versions. The 1713 edition is the copy text for poems that do not appear in the Folger and for versions of poems that are markedly different from the manuscript versions.Every consideration that defined the parameters of this edition—from whether or not to retain punctuation marks and spellings that are archaic, to when and how much to emend, to how to treat titles and triplets and Finch’s own notes and triplets, to the principles that governed annotation—is spelled out clearly in the textual introduction. Anyone curious as to why it took more than three centuries for a scholarly edition of Finch’s work to reach completion need only peruse the description Keith provides of the daunting number and kinds of decisions that had to be made and adhered to with dedication and clear-eyed precision. The literary world is fortunate that Finch’s complicated canon met its match in the editorial skills and intellectual commitment of Jennifer Keith and the team of talented experts she assembled—Claudia Thomas Kairoff as co-editor responsible for shaping much of the commentary on and contextualization of Finch’s poetry as well as other editorial tasks, Jean I. Marsden, as associate editor focused on Finch’s dramatic works, and Rachel Bowman, whose reception history of Finch’s work will appear in volume 2.The timing of the publication of this majestic volume is poignant, appearing as it does in the midst of a global pandemic when we are all in some sense experiencing our own exile from the lives we led before the spring of 2020. Restricted to our own coterie-companions, many of us forcibly retired from public life, most of us living with a sense of persistent unease, we can find in the poems of Finch much to offer. And, while Keith has been diligent in recording significant textual variants in textual notes, the poems themselves are presented “free from the interruption of brackets and other symbols indicating revisions” in order to foreground “the reader’s experience of the poems.” Keith, Kairoff, and Marsden offer comments in the general introduction that situate Finch’s works in the poetic and dramatic milieus of their time, emphasizing the formal categories Finch worked within—and sometimes against: devotional poetry, fable, love poetry, song, ode, satire, occasional verse, and tragicomedic closet drama. The range of generic engagement in and of itself suggests the range of tone and topic of Finch’s output. Playful, melancholy, witty, contemplative, and dignified by turns, the works illustrate the imaginative possibilities that persist even in a life of regrettable restriction. Some familiar favorites—“The Spleen,” “The Introduction,” “A Letter to Daphnis (April 2, 1685),” “The Unequal Fetters”—speak to limitations imposed by biology and culture and, judging by my students’ responses over the years, resonate in our own times for women readers, for readers afflicted by depressive psychological conditions, and for readers newly arrived in and adjusting to unfamiliar environments. These poems need little contextualization to move a reader, but contextualization thickens their effect. Other poems invoke different categories of experience—categories of exile and exclusion and limitation that, until Spring of 2020, I had no idea would apply to my students’ lives, to many readers’ lives, or to my own life. “The Consolation,” for example, captures the rhythm of life in “lockdown”—the dawning of the day, the rising of the sun to the meridian, the coming of the night, and the darkness that engulfs (literally and, often, metaphorically). As in so many of Finch’s poems, a bird is the central figure rising with the day, falling with the night. The consolation, of course, is that in the darkness there is hope for arrival of brightness—which is assured in terms of the rhythms of nature, but doubtful in terms of politics (the poem seems to allude to the rise and fall of James II and the hope of his restoration). For us, as well, there is deep uncertainty as to how and to what degree the pandemic and its attendant woes will alter the world, but we have also had opportunity to develop greater awareness of the constancies that persist—the rising and falling rhythms of diurnal existence that offer the consolation of steadiness and serve as reminders of the possibility of renewal and return.Anne Finch’s poetry is the expression of her heart, the expression of an age, and the expression of the general human condition. In other words, she is a major poet whose works are finally accorded in this edition the establishment of texts and contexts needed for literary history to begin to acknowledge that fact.