Date: 1789

"For of calamity so long the prey, / Imagination now has lost her powers, / Nor will her fairy loom again essay / To dress affliction in a robe of flowers."

— Smith, Charlotte (1749-1806)

Date: 1790

"But a new affliction was preparing for the marquis, which attacked him where he was most vulnerable; and the veil which had so long overshadowed his reason was now to be removed."

— Radcliffe [née Ward], Ann (1764-1823)

Date: 1790, 1794

"Their turn of expression is a dress that hangs so gracefully on gay ideas, that you are apt to suppose that wit, a quality parsimoniously distributed in other countries, is in France as common as the gift of speech."

— Williams, Helen Maria (1759-1827)

Date: December 1790

"But it was the poor man with only his native dignity who was thus oppressed – and only metaphysical sophists and cold mathematicians can discern this insubstantial form; it is a work of abstraction – and a gentleman of lively imagination must borrow some drapery from fancy before he can love or ...

— Wollstonecraft, Mary (1759-1797)

Date: 1781, 1791

"Thou hast no flinty heart which cannot feel, / Thy bosom is not braced with chains of steel."

— Downman, Hugh (1740-1809)

Date: 1792

"Hereditary property sophisticates the mind, and the unfortunate victims to it--if I may so express myself--swathed from their birth, seldom exert that locomotive faculty or body of mind"

— Wollstonecraft, Mary (1759-1797)

Date: w. 1776, 1793

"His pocket and his skull are brothers, / They thrive by borrowing from others; / I thank my stars, with heart sincere, / I was not born to be a Peer."

— Burrell [née Raymond, later Clay], Sophia, Lady Burrell (1750-1802)

Date: 1796

"You! holding the next place to God in my breast, yet two days, and my heart will be unveiled to you."

— Lewis, Matthew Gregory (1775-1818)

Date: 1797

In William Collins's "endeavours to embody the fleeting forms of mind, and clothe them with correspondent imagery, he is not infrequently obscure."

— Barbauld, Anna Letitia [née Aikin] (1743-1825)

Date: 1803

Genius may "Add novel tints to fancy's rainbow dress."

— Downman, Hugh (1740-1809)