Professor of English Chris Foss has published a peer-reviewed article entitled “Ann Yearsley, Earl Goodwin, and the Politics of Romantic Discontent” in the most recent number of Romanticism on the Net. RoN was one of the pioneering international open access journals when it was founded over thirty years ago now in 1996, and is by now one of the most established venues for scholarship on British Romantic literature. The few substantial critical studies of Ann Yearsley’s tragic drama Earl Goodwin leave unexplored the ways in which Yearsley simultaneously is clarifying and extending her anger at and frustration with the class- and gender-based discrimination she experienced firsthand in the fallout with her mentor Hannah More over the profits from her first book of poetry. This article aims to fill this gap by delineating the many ways in which Earl Goodwin represents, on one level, her ongoing response to the defamation she suffered in the wake of More’s public campaign to ruin her reputation. Documenting the inextricability of the play’s explicit social and political critiques with Yearsley’s ongoing response to the More fiasco reinforces the extent to which her more familiar initial protests about More’s treatment (as published in her second volume of poems) are as fundamentally politically as they are personally motivated.
