Lactilla, milkwoman of Clifton

Ann Yearsley was an English poet, playwright, and novelist who lived most of her life in a village near Bristol. Though she began her adult life as a milkwoman she later became the chief support of her family through her writing and proprietorship of a circulating library. This literary biography offers the most thoroughly researched and reasoned account to date of the complex political and social causes of Yearsley's gradual exclusion from the annals of literature.

In the particulars of Yearsley's story, Mary Waldron offers a fascinating example of how literary reputations can flourish or dwindle under the prevalent beliefs and preoccupations of a readership.