Jump to content

Susannah Harrison

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Susannah Harrison (1752–1784) was an English working-class religious poet. Her 1780 collection Songs in the Night went through at least twenty-one editions in Britain and America,[1] making it "one of the best selling collections written by a laboring-class poet in the late eighteenth century".[2]

Harrison was a domestic servant who taught herself to read and write. Aged twenty, she suffered an illness from which she did not expect to survive and gave manuscripts of her poetry to John Condor, a Congregationalist Minister, who edited and published her poems for her.[1] She died 3 August 1784 in Ipswich.

Works

[edit]
  • Songs in the Night, 1780

See also

[edit]

References

[edit]
  1. ^ a b Paula R. Backscheider (2005). Eighteenth-Century Women Poets and Their Poetry: Inventing Agency, Inventing Genre. JHU Press. p. 407. ISBN 978-0-8018-8169-5.
  2. ^ Bridget Keenan, 'Mysticims and Mystifications: The Demands of Laboring-Class Religious Poetry', Criticism, Vol. 47, No. 4 (Fall 2005), pp.471-91
[edit]