Date: 1741

"Poor Mind, who heard all with extreme moderation, / Thought it now time to speak, and make her allegation: / ''Tis I that, methinks, have most cause to complain, / Who am cramped and confined like a slave in a chain.'"

— Carter, Elizabeth (1717-1806)

Date: 1741

"'I've a friend,' answers Mind, 'who, though slow, is yet sure, / And will rid me at last of your insolent power: / Will knock down your walls, the whole fabric demolish, / And at once your strong holds and my slavery abolish: / And while in your dust your dull ruins decay, / I'll snap off my cha...

— Carter, Elizabeth (1717-1806)

Date: 1759

"But the Nets woven by the human Imagination, altho' they are composed of the smallest Materials, are perhaps full as difficult to be broken as the strongest real Bonds"

— Fielding, Sarah (1710-1768)

Date: 1773

"Now here, now there, the roving Fancy flies, / Till some lov'd objects strikes her wand'ring eyes, / Whose silken fetters all the senses bind, / And soft captivity involves the mind."

— Wheatley, Phillis (c.1753–1784)

Date: 1784

"Had I the dread necessity explained, / That with resistless force my freedom chained; / Tore the sweet bands, by virtuous passion tied, / And stampt our constancy with parricide."

— Seward, Anna (1742-1809)

Date: 1788

"See the fond links of feeling nature broke! / The fibres twisting round a parent's heart, / Torn from their grasp, and bleeding as they part."

— More, Hannah (1745-1833)

Date: 1788

"He had been the slave of beauty, the captive of sense; love he ne'er had felt; the mind never rivetted the chain, nor had the purity of it made the body appear lovely in his eyes."

— Wollstonecraft, Mary (1759-1797)