Elizabeth Thomas, who wrote under the name “Corinna,” was born in 1675 and died in 1731. She belongs to that large and fascinating company of early eighteenth-century women writers whose lives survive only in fragments: poems, letters, dedications, hostile anecdotes, printers’ advertisements, and the recollections of men whose literary fame later eclipsed theirs. Yet Thomas was far more than a minor satellite of Alex…
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
Elizabeth Thomas
Poet B
Aphra Behn
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.
Kindred spirits
Their work already rhymes in the catalogue. The rest of this page is the story around that rhyme.
Biography 68%
Poems 84%
Blended 75%
Swap sides
Another related pair
Aphra Behn, born around 1640 and dead on 16 April 1689, occupies a singular position in English literary history: she was a successful Restoration playwright, a daring poet, an innovator in prose fiction, a political writer, and, most importantly for later generations, a woman who openly made writing her profession. Her precise origins remain uncertain, a fact that has invited both scholarly caution and romantic spec…
“I do not pretend, in giving you the history of this royal slave, to entertain my reader with the adventures of a feigned hero.”
In time
Elizabeth Thomas
Aphra Behn
1640
1731
They overlapped for 15 years (1675–1689).
When Elizabeth Thomas was born, Aphra Behn was about 35.
Elizabeth Thomas was about 14 when Aphra Behn died.
On the map
About 269 km separate Skenfrith, Monmouthshire, Wales from Wye, Kent, England. Shared ground: United Kingdom.
Elizabeth Thomas
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
Elizabeth Thomas only
From the biographies
woman
women
Elizabeth Thomas: skenfrith, monmouthshire, corinna, richard gwinnett, pylades, alexander pope, miscellany poems on several subjects, eighteenth-century women writers. Aphra Behn: restoration playwright, surinam, oroonoko, the rover, the forc'd marriage, astrea, willmore, charles ii.
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
While their lives overlapped
Notable events from the years they were both alive.
1675
King Philip's War
Elizabeth Thomas
Aphra Behn
Emotional landscapes
Elizabeth Thomas: Despair, Sorrow, Anger. Aphra Behn: Longing, Tenderness, Sensuality.