Of The Characters of Women: An Epistle To A Lady, to give the poem its full title, was the last of the four ethic epistles Pope wrote, though he gave it second place when he collected his “Epistles to Several Persons” together in his Works, Vol. II, published on 23 April 1735. An Epistle To A Lady had first been published as a separate poem two and a half months earlier, on 8 February 1735, a year after An Epistle To Cobham, to which it was intended as a companion piece. If An Epistle To Cobham focuses primarily on the characters of men, although it includes two cutting satiric vignettes of women, An Epistle To A Lady focuses exclusively on the characters of women. Although the target o

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Published 24 January 2002

Citation: Gordon, Ian. "An Epistle to a Lady [Moral Essay II]". The Literary Encyclopedia. 24 January 2002.
[http://www.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=6702, accessed 20 November 2009.]