Rewriting Pope's Eloisa to Abelard: Judith Cowper's Abelard to Eloisa and Early Gothic Sensibility. Issue 6 (17th August 2016)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Alexander, Laura
• Is Part Of: English studies. Volume 97:Issue 6(2016)
• Page Start: 608
• Page End: 617
• Publication Date: 2016-08-17
• Subjects: English philology -- Periodicals; English literature -- Study and teaching -- Periodicals; Philologie anglaise -- Périodiques; Littérature anglaise -- Étude et enseignement -- Périodiques; 420
• DOI: 10.1080/0013838X.2016.1183952
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 0013-838X

Abstract

ABSTRACT: One of the many poetical "responses" by eighteenth-century writers to Alexander Pope's Eloisa to Abelard (1717) was Judith Cowper's Abelard to Eloisa (written 1720, published 1728), a poem that retells the story of the ill-fated French medieval lovers, Peter Abelard and Héloise. Replete with Eloisa's erotic longings, frustration and yearnings both for her lover, Abelard, and God, Pope's poem especially appealed to readers and writers throughout the eighteenth century, including Cowper, aunt of the famous poet of sensibility, William Cowper. If Pope wished to inspire "some future Bard" ( Eloisa to Abelard, l. 359), he achieved his goal. His poem helped to shape later narratives and poems written in England about the medieval lovers, including Cowper's. Though Cowper wrote other poems in her lifetime, many of them in dialogue with Pope's poetry, Abelard to Eloisa was her most famous and her best; it was also her only gothic work. She was an important writer, and this early gothic text features in her Abelard an original pathos figure that anticipates the "man of feeling" in later eighteenth-century literature of sensibility.