Description
The Life of Sarah Egerton 1668 – 1723
‘My daring pen, will bolder sallies make, and like my self, an uncheck’d freedom take.’
The writer of those words did her best to live up to them. She published a long feminist poem at the age of seventeen in defiance of her father ‒ who then exiled her from her London home. Her life story reveals a woman struggling against the constraints imposed by family, gender and economic position, making bold stabs at independence and forced to settle for ultimately unsatisfactory compromises.
Sarah Egerton lived most of her life in Buckinghamshire at Shenley, Adstock and finally Winslow. Her poetry, rediscoved in the 1970s, brings together her personal experience with rallying cries to women. In this book David Noy combines the autobiographical nature of Sarah’s poetry with historical research to tell her life story.