Fanny Greville, born Frances Macartney about 1724 and dead on 28 July 1789, occupies a distinctive if elusive place in eighteenth-century English poetry. Her surviving reputation rests principally on a small number of poems, above all “A Prayer for Indifference,” rather than on a large published oeuvre or a public literary career of the sort enjoyed by many of her male contemporaries. Yet the very modesty of her exta…
Compare Poets
Pick two poets who seem to have nothing to do with each other — a Gothic American and a pastoral Englishman, say — and see where the catalogue actually joins them: overlapping years, shared ground, distinctive themes, and the poems that secretly rhyme.
Poet A
Fanny Greville
Poet B
Edith M. Thomas
Compare two related contemporaries
A random pair who overlapped in time and whose poems already rhyme in the catalogue — a way into poets you may not have met.
Strongly related
Their work already rhymes in the catalogue. The rest of this page is the story around that rhyme.
Biography 72%
Blended 72%
Swap sides
Another related pair
Edith Matilda Thomas was born on 12 August 1854 in Chatham, Ohio, and died on 13 September 1925 in New York City. During her lifetime she was admired as one of the most accomplished American lyric poets of the late nineteenth century, praised by editors, fellow writers, and readers for verse that joined close observation of nature to emotional reserve, formal intelligence, and a searching spiritual imagination. Yet s…
“There is nothing duller than the habitual liar, who is so from the mere love of falsehood.”
In time
Fanny Greville
Edith M. Thomas
1724
1925
Their lives did not overlap.
65 years separate the earlier death from the later birth.
On the map
About 6,042 km separate England from Chatham, Ohio, USA. Different countries, different weather — unless a poem carries one landscape into the other.
Fanny Greville
Themes they return to
Distinctive words drawn from each poet’s critiqued poems — what they keep writing about, not just what their biographies mention.
Shared
Fanny Greville only
From the biographies
women
culture
Fanny Greville: county tyrone, anglo-irish, fulke greville, a prayer for indifference, the court of death, samuel johnson, eighteenth-century poetry, culture of sensibility. Edith M. Thomas: chatham, ohio, new york city, helen hunt jackson, a new year's masque, the inverted torch, lyrics and sonnets, northeastern ohio, romantic poetry.
Poems that secretly rhyme
The closest poem-to-poem matches in critique space — the sort of kinship a listener hears before the catalogue admits it.
The world around them
Fanny Greville
1785
Relocation to Bath
Edith M. Thomas
Emotional landscapes
Fanny Greville: Sorrow, Despair, Longing. Edith M. Thomas: Sorrow, Longing, Despair.